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Evening Standard
Evening Standard
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India Block

Comment: 'Sadiq Khan's tax on paved gardens is a bulwark against toxic petro-masculinity'

It’s the hottest day of the year (so far) and London is baking. Just days before it was raining so hard that water was flooding the streets.

We know that we are going to have to make changes if the city is to survive our changing climate. The London Climate Resilience Review, commissioned by Mayor of London Sadiq Khan and published this week, lays out the stark facts: “flooding poses a lethal risk to Londoners”.

One of the three core policies identified or fast-tracking in the review is “de-paving front gardens, public and community spaces for water attenuation and to support wildlife”. It has recommended that the new Labour government “consider introducing stormwater charges for people who pave over gardens and incentives to remove paving”.

Looking at my own shady bricked-over front garden, straggling with weeds and litter drifting in from the street, I have to concur that an incentive to turn it into a nice, absorbent moss garden is a brilliant idea. If we all dug up the paving and planted, some of that rainwater would be used to grow, rather than pose danger.

But not everyone seems so enthused.

The reactionary response from the right is depressing but textbook. “Is Sadiq Khan plotting to tax our driveways?” scarmongered the Daily Mail. “Sadiq Khan-backed plan wants to TAX home owners who concrete over gardens” blared GB News.

It’s the same anti-establishment petrolhead mood that has fuelled (pun intended) the backlash to Khan’s ultra low emission zone (Ulez) scheme. Roving gangs of middle-aged men using improvised IED’s to blow up Ulez cameras isn’t a funny sidebar in the news — it’s a sign of something far more troubling.

‘Petro-masculinity’ is the term coined by political scientist Cara Daggett to explain the link between support for fossil fuels, climate refusal, capitalism and conservative masculinity. It’s born of a nostalgic mid-century dream, when men were men and cars were cars. Daggett uses it primarily to describe the phenomenon of climate refusal promoted by Conservative white men in the US, but it’s revving up here across the pond.

Anxiety around gender coupled with unease about the environment has been with us for centuries, something futurist Douglas Rushkoff excavates in his book, ‘Survival of the Richest’. Techno-optimist billionaires don’t mind burning down the world so long as they can escape to their bunkers/rockets to Mars. And their empirical scientific tradition is founded on a world view hinging on “nature [as] dark, scary and female — a boundless and all-encompassing space of mystery” to be subjugated along with women and indigenous people.

Of course, women and minorities gaining rights doesn’t take anything away from white men. Just like taking steps to counter climate change benefits everyone in the long run. But when people feel threatened, their knee-jerk response is to protect their perceived freedoms — often with violent results.

Will people riot in the streets if paved driveways get taxed? Perhaps not, but the fervent backlash against a policy supported by our Muslim mayor is a sign of what Daggett frames as a movement “embracing a toxic combination of climate denial, racism and misogyny”.

When the potential future Vice President of America is joking about the UK being “an Islamist country” we must be alert to the connections being made between civil rights and cars by violent fantasists.

It’s in the vein of the deranged authoritarian drive that has seen Just Stop Oil’s activists handed some of the harshest prison sentences available. You’d get less time for committing a heinous sex crime — indeed, the same judge let off a police officer who used his position to prey on a drunk woman with a slap on the wrist. But blocking a motorway is close to sedition these days. Free movement of cars trumps protecting vulnerable women.

Maybe some people will feel threatened by an edict to re-plant their paved gardens-turned-driveways or pay the price. Maybe all that spooky, permeable, feminine absorbent moss wigs you out in comparison to nice safe, solid, masculine concrete. But you can’t profit in a drowned world, and you won’t be able to park your car in a flooded city.

There are already initiatives in London planting these seeds of hope. The City of London has been proactively making changes for climate resilience, planting rain gardens in neglected pockets of paving. If our skyscrapered-over financial centre can do it without upsetting the finance bros, surely we can all make our homes that little bit more permeable.

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