Greener on the Other Side of the Pond

I’ve been in London for about a week now, and it’s funny how readily I can see the differences in the United Kingdom’s approach to climate change and environmentalism. It’s in the every day details, most of which I see evidence of every day while I’m wandering about:

• Construction sites with placards noting that the contractor is socially and environmentally conscious;
• Dig sites all around London for the city’s gargantuan effort to replace Victorian water mains: they’re predicting “typical saving[s] to be about one million litres per day for each of the [work] zones” (Thames Water);
• The city’s efforts to publicize smog levels on a daily basis (and yes, they do that in LA, too);
• The way everyone walks, bikes, or takes public transit. There are plenty of taxis but very few private cars, far fewer than you see in Manhattan;
• The fact that of the private vehicles on the road, so many of them are itsy bitsy Smart Cars or motorbikes–after all, they’ve been paying as much for gasoline in this country for the past several years as we just started paying in the States;
• Ads for the hydrogen-cell public buses coming to the city, 10 of them by 2010. It’s a miniscule fraction of the buses in use, but it’s an important symbol;
• The mayor’s fabulous multi-pronged approach to tackling climate change, which includes green building advice (and homes that have gone green get a cute little sticker to put in their window to show their neighbors), a “green concierge”, and an initiative to curtail short-haul business flights

London isn’t perfect. It’s still a metropolitan area with more than 7.5 million inhabitants. The London fog for which it was so famous for so long? The effluvia of the industrial era’s new factories, trapped by wind patterns into hovering over the city instead of moving out to sea. That’s one reason air quality can be so hazardous to people’s health that the city, on some days, puts out an advisory to avoid outdoor exercise. But it’s nice to be in a city where people take it for granted that you should walk instead of drive to the store half a mile away, and where the local mini-markets offer local and organic foods as a matter of course (Tesco’s, the supermarket giant of the UK, has just started putting the carbon footprint of their products on the label). Brittania might not rule any longer, but that’s not stopping London from being an urban trendsetter in the fight against climate change.