My fearless and unstoppable colleague here at the Daily Sceptic has discovered a very interesting cache of documents relating to a campaigning organisation’s support for London’s Ulez. In her Woke Waste/DOGE UK project, Charlotte Gill has been looking into an organisation calling itself the New Economy Organisers Network (NEON). NEON is one in a constellation of fake civil society organisations that seem to exist to dominate the public sphere with a performance of ‘grassroots’ activism, but which are better understood as ‘astroturf’. And sure enough, one of the big issues that NEON got behind since its inception some time around 2022 was the London Mayor’s Ultra Low Emissions Zone expansion.
Here is Charlotte’s presentation of her own research.
Let’s get straight to the point about astroturfing. As I’ve pointed out in countless articles here, all organisations operating in the woke/eco/Left sphere turn out to have the same extremely generous grantors. And NEON is no exception. In its first two years, NEON collected just shy of £6 million from political philanthropy. Here’s a snapshot of its larger grantors.
Charlotte discusses many of the organisations involved, which are of interest to her work. The European Climate Foundation (ECF), which I go on about a lot, is up there near the top. The ECF’s involvement is interesting to my work for two reasons. First, political philanthropy aligns fake civil society with particular causes because strategic coordination by the grantor is a condition of
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Poor old britain. Feels like walking through sludge rather than skipping through a field of daisies. I can see shy.
And yet the countries with higher fossil fuel usage have the cleanest air. See OWID below where two of their info graphics have been put together although I doubt they intended this comparison to be made.
China and India are the exception and there are good reasons why.
OWID also show ‘Deaths from Fossil Fuels’ – of course they would.
This has to have been mathematically derived and in other words its artificially contrived.
The inescapable truth is that everyone dies of something. That death will come from a multitude of factors, far too complex to say which one was actually the tipping point to the grave. We also age naturally, have inherited characteristics which might finish us off. Even within the same house, we will have different habits that might change our outcomes. Ascribing deaths simply to ‘un-clean air’ is facile nonsense.
I was brought up in the 1960’s in an industrial city, and then, you could have said there was cause and effect for many. Bronchitis was prevalent, but then our houses were cold apart from coal fires. The air today is far cleaner and better to breathe than it was pre ‘Clean Air Act, 1965’, deindustrialisation playing a big part.
Recently, I went into our local ‘Clean Air Zone’, and was disappointed to find out the air was the same stuff I’d been breathing outside the zone. What a swizz…
At the start of the London low pollution zones, a document called Up in the Air was produced by one author. In it NO2 was described as a mild pollutant. It seemed like a reasonable account of how the central zone was contributing to possible health improvements. But in the tables the actual figures were given. For a man who had lived in the zone for 80 years, the pollution would reduce his lifespan by a few months for particulates and even less for NO2. To obtain the 40k deaths every year, this period was multiplied by the whole population. It was a false figure.
Another interesting figure was that Kensington and Tower Hamlets suffered similar pollution but one had tbe longest lifespan in the country and the other had the lowest, except Glasgow of course.
However, this was taken up by the medical profession and regulator. The original Up in the Air was then ‘improved’ with the help of additional authors from King’s College until NO2 became a dangerous poison and road particulates were lethal, despite being 100 times lower than in the London Tube.
This all allowed the mayor to extend the ULEZ zone to the outskirts and… Read more »
And yet life expectancy has been increasing steadily since 1760. The graphic below shows the huge benefits of the Industrial Revolution and all driven by coal ant then oil.
That is undoubtedly true, however the improvements in food, medicine and hygiene over this time would have a greater effect than air pollution. Also since the 1950s the air quality in London is many times better.
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Ulez blob debunked years ago by the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication…
https://wintoncentre.maths.cam.ac.uk/news/does-air-pollution-kill-40000-people-each-year-uk/
“…There are huge uncertainties surrounding all the measures of impacts of air pollution, with inadequate knowledge replaced by substantial doses of expert judgement. These uncertainties should be better reflected in the public debates.
In addition, the situation in the UK is not what we would usually think of as a ‘crisis’. It can still be good to seek improvements in air quality, but only provided these are based on a careful analysis of the costs per life-year saved.”