Latest news with #GreatSmog
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Dear Mayor, don't reverse the good you have done for the air Londoners breathe
Next year it will be a decade since Sadiq Khan was first elected Mayor of London. He has not got everything right — name a political leader who has — but in one area he can justifiably look back with pride and take credit for a real improvement in the quality of life in this great city. London's once notoriously filthy air is cleaner and healthier to breathe now than it was when he came into office. Almost every monitoring site in the capital shows fewer pollutants and air quality here is improving at a faster rate than the rest of the country. Clean air for Londoners is a cause that the Standard has championed enthusiastically for many years, as far back as the Great Smog of 1952. More recently we have run campaigns under The Air We Breathe and Plug It In banners. So it is all the more puzzling to us that the Mayor would consider putting this remarkable progress in jeopardy. Yet that is precisely what he is doing. On Christmas Day this year the congestion charge exemption — known as the Cleaner Vehicle Discount (CVD) — that drivers of fully electric and hydrogen cell vehicles have enjoyed since 2019 comes to an end. After that, drivers of EV cars and vans will have to pay the same daily £15 fee as everyone else to enter central London. A laudable and effective incentive that has encouraged countless thousands of motorists to convert to electric will have gone. Driving people away from EVs Of course it is true that most private drivers do not have to travel into central London by car — in this city we are lucky to have excellent public transport alternatives. But many people do. Companies with large delivery fleets, DPD, Amazon, DHL, FedEx, Royal Mail, to name but a few have invested millions of pounds in EV vans, partly because they want to be doing the right thing, but also because it makes good financial sense. The same is true of supermarkets and other retailers. Unless there is a rethink from the GLA they will soon face yet another burden at a time when they are struggling to cope with a raft of extra costs ranging from energy bills to business rates. And not least the taxis and private hire operators, such as Uber, that have been rightly encouraged to green their huge fleets will face a punitive new financial burden of up to £5,500 per vehicle per year. Uber's own internal polling found that almost 90 per cent of non EV-drivers said removing the EV exemption would make them less likely to switch. More than 40 per cent of Uber's EV drivers said they were likely to switch back to a petrol or diesel vehicle. The stakes are incredibly high. Around 40 per cent of the miles driven in Greater London on Uber are now in fully electric cars, but the polling suggests that progress will be stopped in its tracks. It is those sort of calculations that prompted 40 companies and organisations ranging from the AA to Zedify to write to the Mayor last year urging him to reconsider. As the letter says, 'Many of us have taken on debt to invest in our children's future and in van sales are double those in the UK. In the Swedish capital of Stockholm all city-centre parking spaces run by the city must be equipped with charging points. Transport for London's response is that the congestion charge is all about keeping central London's roads moving, not about improving air quality. As the number of EVs on London's road's increases, so the efficacy of the charge is undermined, it argues. TfL also maintains that drivers have been given seven years notice of the ending of the CVD, since it was first flagged in its 2018 Transport Strategy. Yet that same strategy laid out plans for a raft of other measures, such as a central London zero emissions zone and what it describes as a 'more sophisticated way of paying for road use'. Little of this has come to pass, leaving the CVD to do much of the heavy lifting when it comes to cleaning central London's air. It would be a tragedy if the progress achieved over the past decade on Khan's watch was to be undone by a dogmatic insistence on sticking to an arbitrary timetable. Today the Standard launches a new clean air campaign, Leading the Charge. We urge the Mayor to think again, to lock in that progress in reducing pollution that has done so much to improve everyday life in London and reverse his regressive decision to end the CVD. Londoners deserve no less. Leading The Charge is supported by commercial partners which share the project's aims but our journalism remains editorially independent. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Hamilton Spectator
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hamilton Spectator
A missing novelist, an early 20th-century painter and the Brontë sisters inspire new historical fiction
'The Story She Left,' by Patti Callahan Henry, Simon & Schuster Canada, $25.99. Inspired by the unsolved disappearance of 25-year-old fantasy novelist Barbara Newhall Follett in 1939, Henry's fictional version concerns Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham, who walks out on her husband and child in 1927 South Carolina. In 1952, Bronwyn's daughter, Clara Harrington, an elementary school art teacher and award-winning children's book illustrator, receives a perplexing call from a London stranger, Charlie Jameson, who has a leather satchel with a manuscript; he has instructions from his recently deceased father to give it in person to Clara. She travels there with her asthmatic eight-year-old daughter Wynnie, where the Great Smog displaces them to the cleaner air of the pastoral Lake District. A Russian nesting doll of secrets is revealed — including the whereabouts of a mysterious linguistic key that will unlock the story of the second novel Bronwyn left behind when she abandoned her family — in this tender narrative about the unbreakable bond between mothers and daughters. 'The Resistance Painter,' by Kath Jonathan, Simon & Schuster Canada, $24.99. In a dual timeline that artfully shifts between occupied Poland during the Second World War and Toronto in 2010, we follow the lives of two women artists, painter Irena Marianowska and her granddaughter Josephine Blum, a sculptor who specializes in graveyard monuments that reveal the life stories of the deceased. As a teenager, Irena joins the Polish resistance known as the AK, the Army Krajowa, in Warsaw, and works secretly for many years helping Jewish citizens escape through the underground network of sewers and aboveground safe houses. When a commission introduces Josephine to an ailing Polish client, Stefan, who claims to have also served in the resistance, she discovers a threatening truth about his past that leads her to the horrors of Ravensbrück and her own family history, in which her intrepid, risk-taking, beloved grandmother dared all to do what was morally right. Examining sacrifice, selflessness and resilience, Jonathan's atmospheric debut is both timely and timeless. 'Six Days in Bombay,' by Alka Joshi, MIRA, $25.99. Amrita Sher-Gil, the early 20th-century painter known as 'the Frida Kahlo of India' and the daughter of a Hungarian Jewish mother and an Indian aristocrat father, inspires the fictional biracial figurative painter Mira Novak who is at the heart of this engrossing novel that opens in 1937 Bombay. Hospitalized due to complications from a miscarriage, Mira is expected to make a full recovery. Yearning for a life larger than her own, attending nurse Sona Falstaff, only a few years younger, welcomes Mira's exotic and enchanting stories of travels and former lovers throughout Europe. When Mira dies suddenly, the hospital administration wrongly focuses on Sona, dismissing her. Even though the nurse only knew her patient for a short time, four of Mira's paintings have been left in her care to pass along to people from her past in Prague, Florence and Paris. Themes of identity and self-discovery drive this engaging portrait of young women daring to challenge societal expectations to become who they are meant to be. 'Fifteen Wild Decembers,' by Karen Powell, Europa Editions, $27. With its title appropriately lifted from an Emily Brontë poem, this captivating coming-of-age novel opens with six-year-old Emily joining her sisters at a girls' school in 1824, where the unsanitary conditions lead to the rampant spread of tuberculosis and the Brontës' subsequent return home to Haworth. Raised by their widowed father and his sister-in-law, and educated both at home and in boarding schools, encouraged to draw, write stories and stomp about the moors in the company of several cherished family dogs, the surviving Brontë children — Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne — share lives enriched and inspired by the natural world. Powell's sumptuous, careful prose vividly recreates Victorian Yorkshire and richly conveys Emily's vibrant inner life that sets her imagination aflame as she writes 'Wuthering Heights,' its wildness in her heart. An immersive, moving, literary page-turner.
