Transcribe your podcast
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Move. It looks as if things are coming to a head over the climate. It's been the warmest year ever recorded, with heat waves, deadly wildfires and floods. But tensions have been heating up over how fast and how fairly we should act on climate change.

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Who are you to stop me and my child going about a day? I'm desperate about this future for young people.

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They're coming across as dictators.

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What's your problem here? You're my problem, actually.

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We need to listen and understand why they feel so angry.

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Is society really split over climate, or are we just watching the UK's green ambitions colliding headlong with the reality of delivering them? Something certainly shifted two years ago in Glasgow. There could have been no doubt over where we were headed. If we don't get serious about climate change today, it will be too late for our children to do so tomorrow. But after promising to accelerate the net zero agenda, the government has now decided to slow things down.

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It cannot be right for Westminster to impose such significant costs on working people, especially those who are already struggling to make ends.

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What prompted the change of heart? Well, London's ultra low emission zone has a lot to do with it. More accurately, the vocal campaign against its expansion. It's this opposition to which Conservatives credited their unexpected by election win in Uxbridge in July.

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What we're actually talking about is limits, restrictions, taxes and surveillance.

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This needs to be eased in, it needs to be more gentle and it needs to be thought about better.

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ULEZ is a clean air policy, using thousands of number plate recognition cameras to charge the most polluting vehicles, typically older ones, on the capital's roads. Chargers are never popular, but only ULEZ prompted the emergence of a masked vigilante group, the Blade Runners, destroying enforcement cameras.

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With the mayor and the government backing it, being fully prepared to roll it out and continue to roll it out, I and others have taken it upon ourselves to take down what they install.

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This Blade Runner agreed to speak with us anonymously. This is not his real voice.

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We will not stop until they stop.

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According to police, almost a thousand ULEZ cameras have been vandalized or destroyed, some 200 disappearing completely. Thanks to this video, we know what happened to three of them at a cost of several thousand pounds each. This is millions of pounds worth of taxpayer money, and a lot of people do support the idea of cleaner air and less congestion.

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We are removing what the taxpayer didn't want brought in, in the first place. I take this risk, and we all take this risk, of a physical prison today to fight against the virtual prison of tomorrow for our children and our children's children. The true Blade Runners are as I describe them, they are a pack of lone wolves, right? We're not just stop oil, right? We are fighting this on the back of our own resources and our own gumption.

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Lone wolves or mindless vandals. They're certainly no less popular than just stop oil roadblocking protests by them and insulate Britain to put them on a collision course with furious motorists.

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My son is eleven. He needs to get to school and he's get to work.

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Last year, Sherilyn Speed was banned from driving for a year for trying to push protesters out of the way with her Range Rover. The women she assaulted were also prosecuted for blocking the road. Now Sherilyn and Lou Lancaster, one of the protesters, have agreed to meet for the first time since the incident and maybe clear the air.

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I have to hold my hands up. I did do wrong and I've had to just accept what's come my way. I just felt like, who are you to stop me and my child going about a day? Not like, no disrespect, but that's how I felt at the time. You need to get the message out there, though, and unfortunately, the media is the way we get the message out. The media, they only like drama, they only like things which basically we have to wake people up. It's like, wake up, everybody, look what's happening. And I have no right to block you personally what you're doing, I absolutely agree with that, but I do believe.

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That do you feel, because of the actions of people like Lou, that you are less likely to care about climate environment issues if someone came to you and said, vote for this? Less likely?

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Yeah, absolutely. I'm speaking for so many people in the country that messaged me after that happened, saying the same thing, they wouldn't want to get behind it because it's.

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Really frustrating, given the government's recent shift in position. Is doing things the way you did them actually harmed your cause rather than helped it?

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I don't think so, because we're actually talking about this, whereas if we hadn't done anything, maybe nobody would be talking about, I think maybe why not? You run for Parliament and we vote for you. I don't know, try and do something, get the public behind you so that we can support you more.

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Having talked it over, neither has changed their views, but Lou and Sherilyn may at least understand each other a bit better now.

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You look really sweater. I think it's the windblocking.

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Protests are designed to be unpopular to try and force more climate action from government. Even net zero policies that have broad support risks becoming less so as they're rolled out more widely. After going round and round on the issue for years, the Westminster government now supports expanding onshore wind power, bringing it into step with Scotland where it's had long term support.

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We've been here about 20 years and the first I knew about the wind farm was actually coming back from work one day and thinking, why has somebody put water tower up in the middle of nowhere? That was the first I knew about Whiteley Wind Farm. It sounds like an aircraft that doesn't land.

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Whiteley is the UK's largest onshore wind farm, generating, on a good day, more than enough electricity for all the homes in the city of Glasgow. But to do that, it occupies as much land as Dundee.

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I was just absolutely shocked, to be honest. I couldn't believe the size of it. I mean, which would you rather have? Forest of steel and things with flailing arms, or would you rather have green trees and unspoilt landscapes?

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Well, the truth is, the majority of people across the UK support wind farms, even if those living next door might not.

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They don't ask the people who live next to the turbines what their views are. They ask people who live in London, people in urban areas. We are providing the electricity for people living in cities. That's the reality of it. We get the adverse effects. We don't get any compensation in any form. There are some communities where wind turbines are basically bought in by the community. They're community owned. Fantastic. I would not vote for a party which allows industrial scale wind turbines to be put up unless there was community support.

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If there's an overarching theme uniting all the different tensions that we've seen in the various net zero policies and ideas that we've looked at, it's the idea of there not having been a conversation that people don't feel listened to, that these policies are being imposed upon them rather than developed with them, very much part of the process. And there's perhaps no better example of that than the issue of low traffic neighborhoods in towns like Oxford. Pedestrianizing streets and adding parking restrictions. LTNs aim to reduce car journeys in certain areas. To their proponents, car free zones in cities embody the win wins of a low carbon society. Active travel is a healthier way to get around. The air is cleaner, there's no congestion, so it's the kind of place that people want to hang out, spend their time and their money. But their opponents argue car free zones just push the traffic and its pollution onto main roads like this, swaddling businesses on busy high streets, often in poorer areas, and making local air quality even worse. Clinton Pugh, who owns and runs restaurants on the Cowley Road, said the council failed to listen to the warnings from local businesses before restricting car journeys around them.

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Society is being split and this is the problem. If you don't get people on board and embracing what you want to do, how do you expect it to end up getting the result you want? It's not going to get there. You can't suddenly decide, it's okay, Mr Pew, your businesses can now be destroyed. We're not going to give you any compensation for this.

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Would an anti car policy be okay with you?

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If there's an alternative way to get people of course, if people could get here, if we could all get around. Why haven't they introduced electric trams going in and out, back and forth?

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So can things be different if people are included in the conversation? For some, another green policy in Oxfordshire also sparked outrage. The school's street scheme to prevent parents from dropping kids off by car. At four primary schools, single mom Samita Atkins was having none of it.

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What their plan was was for parents who did need to drive, find kind of parking about ten minutes, walk to the school, walk to the school and go back to your car. That was never going to work for me. I don't have ten minutes. So at that time, I did have these people trying to talk to me. What's your problem here? You're my problem, actually. I didn't want to hear what they had to say, actually. I was really annoyed with them, angry, actually. I just want to get in my car and take my kids to school, go to work. It was irrelevant to me. I'm a driver, so back then, my attitude was very different.

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Hi. What?

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Road to the Rescue was the primary school's bike bus scheme, led by parent volunteers who collect children from home and cycle them in every day.

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Parents asking, Can I charge the bike bus? And now it's a question of capacity.

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It was Lara who talked. Several parents, including Samita, round the scheme, even loaned her girls bikes from a school bike library and taught them how to ride.

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I think offering support made the parents feeling okay. I've been hurt, actually. So someone is helping here and everybody agrees about clean air safety. Kids on bike having fun. Just take it right before you turn left.

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A cycle to school scheme in Oxford isn't applicable to every town. It isn't a model for the enormous policy challenges of getting to net zero required by UK law and global scientific consensus. But perhaps it highlights some basic truths.

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How can we bring a constructive attitude rather than a confrontational one? We need to kind of sit at the same table and listen.

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Ambitious green targets will only be met by policies that accommodate the needs of those impacted the most. If not, the current gap between net zero ambition and reality will be filled by increasing frustration and resistance. Tom Clark, Sky News.

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And you need to get.