Small signs to tackle big issue

Have you been turning your engine off at the level crossings in St Stephen’s, St Dunstan’s and Sturry? New signs to encourage drivers to turn their engines off have been up for a few months now. Have you spotted them? Did you notice they were very small?

I did liaise with the council about this in the planning stages and suggested they needed to be easy to spot and read, have an impact and also be positioned far back up the roads approaching the crossing, as there is always a long queue. But from my observations, many drivers are still not turning their engines off.

The signs are there to encourage drivers, but they are inconspicuous. Was this project ill-thought out by the council, especially since it was a publicly-funded project and a fair bit of money was spent on research? Has lip-service only been paid to the problem, rather than meaningfully addressing the situation of a climate emergency? Portsmouth have really big signs saying “Cough cough, turn your engine off”. They are everywhere, all over the city. You just can’t miss them. They make you want to turn your engine off.

Are we more worried about wanting the signs to blend in rather than showing real concern for the health of our residents? Ultimately, it’s down to us as individuals. We all know the effects of air pollution in built-up and high density areas, such as schools and level crossings. So isn’t it about time we all started to do our bit, however small?

And before you say it takes more energy to turn the engine off and on than to leave it on - that is a myth! Cllr Mel Dawkins

St Stephens (Labour)

emitters. I wonder where they stand in the league table of rainforest removers? Climate change is not just about carbon dioxide emissions. The world has focused on them because the argument has been driven by anti-capitalist green campaigners who have demonised the car. There are plenty of other “greenhouse gases”, methane for example, or nitrous oxide or even humble water vapour. There are also plenty of ways in which our use of the land contributes by not locking up CO2 - cutting down rainforests is one of them. Locally, nothing we do will make one jot of difference. The UK contributes 1% of carbon emissions and falling. If other bits of the world do not follow our lead we will, as Professor Rootes points out, all suffer. But they aren’t. Fortunately mankind is enormously resilient and inventive. We survived global warming and climate change in the early medieval warm period and the opposite in the Little Ice Age. Provided we adapt and stop listening to teenage prophets of doom and their millenarian followers, we will adapt and survive. However, we have to start planning now - but nobody’s listening. They are all too busy trying to stop the unstoppable instead of planning to live with it! As Private Fraser told us “we’re all doomed!”

Orchard Close, Canterbury