Climate Change Is All About Control

Dear Editor,

As a schoolboy in 1980s Leeds (England), it took 20 minutes to drive to school. Now it takes twice that. The perennially leftist Leeds City Council has reduced speed limits to jogging levels (with speed trap cameras!), constructed artificial chicanes and road humps, choked roads with unused bike lanes and installed unnecessary stop lights. Now they’re even blocking roads with large concrete barriers. They call them “LTN”s – “Low Traffic Neighbourhoods.” (LTN) No kidding!

Leftists and climate extremists are intent on making driving as difficult, expensive, frustrating and time consuming as they can. The left despises and resents the private automobile because they can’t control it. It’s our freedom. They want to herd us onto “mass transit” like cattle, or implement “micromobility solutions.” That’s a euphemism for forcing us onto bicycles and scooters. Their ultimate goal is to make personal vehicles obsolete, and they’re doing it surreptitiously and slyly with “Vision Zero” and other sound good Pollyanna projects. Greensboro’s version is called the Mobility Greensboro 2040 Plan, by which they intend to make our city “car optional.”  That’s progressive bureaucrat-speak for making it impossible for us to drive around our city, as they’re doing in the English city of Oxford. Next year that city will be divided into six zones or neighborhoods, and it will be made illegal for people to drive outside their own zone unless they apply for a permit. Get back in your pod, peasant!

The people of Oxford will certainly be living in a “car optional” city, whether they like it or not.

The activist Climate + Community Project (CCP) recently called for “reducing car dependency” to promote “transit equity” and “global justice.”  They claim these violations of our fundamental rights are necessary to mitigate “the climate crisis.” That’s funny, I don’t see any crisis, do you? If “climate change” was a conservative hobbyhorse they’d be calling it a conspiracy theory.

Because it’s not about “climate;” it’s about control.

Don’t let them fool you. The left is waging an undeclared war on our cars, and our physical freedom.

We need to fight them at every turn, right now. Or we will be made into abject serfs, deprived of our cars and our freedom, and permitted only to bicycle or bus within our “zone.”

Austin Morris