London is missing its own targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions from road transport by ever-greater margins.

The relentless rise in the volume of traffic is the cause. It has increased in each of the four years since the Mayor, Sadiq Khan, announced the aim of cutting the total amount of traffic by 27 per cent by 2030.

Far from heading for “net zero”, the city’s road transport is still pumping around seven million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the air each year. 

Dangerous

And Labour’s transport policy, focused on sinking billions into building roads and airports, makes matters worse.

It’s not only that the targets are being missed. They were set at far too modest levels in the first place – far short of what climate scientists say needs to be done, for London to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the necessary pace.

Campaign groups are fighting for much more ambitious plans to cut road traffic, and expand public transport, walking and cycling in London, which are not only socially just and healthier, but are also essential to tackling the climate emergency.

The undermining of decarbonisation targets is not confined to London or its roads. It is part of the dangerous political trend, at national and international level, to mask continued fossil-fuelled economic expansion with “green” rhetoric. 

How London politicians undermined climate action

Sadiq Khan set the target, of reducing vehicle-kilometres driven in London by 27 per cent by 2030, in January 2022. It was a centre-piece of his declaration that the city would aim to be “carbon neutral” at the end of this decade, rather than 2050.

The announcement was welcomed by climate policy campaigners, because cutting the number of cars on the road is the single most effective way to cut greenhouse gas emissions from transport.

But in the four years since then, City Hall, which turns out prodigous quantities of documents and consultations on many aspects of policy, has not issued a single sheet of paper explaining how this target might be met. 

The volume of traffic increased in London, as it did across the country, in 2022, 2023 and 2024. Government estimates suggest that in 2025 it rose again. See Graph no. 1.

Consequently, carbon dioxide emissions from road transport in London are falling, but way, way behind the pace targeted by City Hall, let alone the speed urged by climate scientists. See Graph no. 2. 

Wellbeing

“Further action will be required to meet the accelerated 2030 ambition”, Transport for London bosses admit in their annual review (a stupendous understatement) – but do not say a word about what those actions might be.

In practice, the “net zero by 2030” target has been declared, and cynically dropped.

Drew Pearce, senior transport consultant at City Science, told The Ecologist: “There was a small window in which the climate crisis was considered an appropriately high priority across different levels of governance and during this period many necessarily ambitious targets were set. 

"However, since then competing issues such as the cost of living crisis has understandably reduced the focus on the delivery against these targets.”

In transport, he said, the priority is to “place greater focus on practical mechanisms that enable change—particularly behavioural measures that can simultaneously reduce emissions while delivering economic, health and wellbeing benefits”.

Temperature

In London, as at national level, Labour’s transport policy remains stubbornly car-centred. Electric vehicles are presented as the main route to decarbonising transport, despite researchers debunking that fantasy.

A team at Imperial College led by Lisa Winkler showed, in a paper published back in 2023, in the leading scientific journal Nature Communications, that policies need to focus not on electrification but on “mitigating emissions from cars that exist today” – either by reducing the distance they are driven, or retrofitting them with electric engines.

The team studied the potential effect, in a range of scenarios, of electrification, retrofitting, “lightweighting” cars, and reducing their use. 

Only a “rapid and large-scale reduction in car use” could achieve short-term emissions targets, meet stringent carbon budgets and avoid creating excessive demand for additional technology, material and minerals. 

Limiting the global temperature rise to two degrees C depends on actions such as these, Winkler and her colleagues concluded. 

Expanding

To reach decarbonisation targets proposed by climate scientists at the Tyndall centre, the Britain’s premier climate research centre, would need “a 72 per cent reduction in car travel activity” and a phase-out of fossil fuelled cars – by 2025. 

This target, like many targets based on climate science rather than politicians’ whims, has been missed by a very long way.

Other researchers have shown that electrifying car fleets not only takes time, but is also materials-intensive, and potentially carbon-intensive, depending on where the cars are made. 

For example, if electric cars are built in coal-fuelled Indian or Chinese factories, the life-cycle carbon emissions are much higher. The batteries are a big part of the problem.

All these realities are brushed aside by politicians at both London and national level. Their biggest transport spending decisions have been aimed at expanding the road network.

Disastrous

In London, the £2.2 billion Silvertown tunnel, built by the private Riverlinx consortium, opened in April last year. In its first three months of operation, there were fewer journeys through it than expected, as drivers sought to avoid paying tolls. 

But, as opponents of the project warned for years, it will help produce more traffic. No wonder London’s traffic reduction target is being swept under the carpet.

At national level, the government is ploughing ahead with the monstrous 14-kilometre, six-lane Lower Thames Crossing. 

As the Transport Action Network has shouted from the rooftops, this will divert billions of pounds of state funding from balanced transport system development, undermine rail freight and “cement inequality”. 

Together with the disastrous decision to build a new runway at Gatwick airport, it will drive up UK transport sector carbon emissions.   

Ruinous

The obsessive concentration on road-building goes hand in hand with lukewarm gestures in support of public transport and active travel. In London, tube and overground rail fares are rising faster than inflation, under an agreement between City Hall and the government, and the cap on bus fares could well be raised or removed in July. 

Nationally, a restriction on local authorities owning bus companies has been removed, but this falls far short of a wholesale roll-back of the privatisation drive that has ruined bus services in many parts of the country. The gouging of rail services by private operators continues.

Labour’s dogged commitment to roads and cars is also reflected in transport policy documents. The latest draft road investment strategy justifies road building with claims that it supports economic growth and meets “the needs of road users” and “the specific needs of the freight and logistics sector”. It suggests, falsely, that decarbonisation mainly means electrifying the fleet.

Transport secretary Heidi Alexander claims, in her introduction to the strategy, that the road sector will “play its part” on climate by implementing the transport decarbonisation plan published by the Tory government in 2024, a collection of worthless platitudes and vague promises. 

Meanwhile, transport department statisticians envisage that total road traffic volume in 2060 will be between eight per cent and 54 per cent higher than in 2025 – and the politicians have no plans to bring those ruinous numbers down.

The bonfire of climate targets  

London’s abandonment in practice of its commitments is part of a larger bonfire of climate targets. The changes that scientists have shown are necessary, to safeguard humanity from the worst effects of climate change, are systematically obscured and undermined by political processes. 

The global position is illustrated by the Climate Action Tracker thermometer, which shows that if all current emissions reduction commitments were kept to, the world would likely face heating of 2.6 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures. 

But anyone who follows the news knows that even those commitments will not be kept to. The junking of London’s transport targets is a microcosm of this bigger danger.

At the National Emergency Briefing on climate in November last year, Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre warned of “a very real possibility” of four degrees of global heating by 2100. 

Heating levels between three and four degrees would result in “the widespread breakdown of society, geopolitical instability and the loss of any meaningful economy”, so fossil fuels must be “eliminated – or warming, and risk, simply accelerates”.

Rich

Anderson said that UK “climate leadership” is a myth. “Once we rightly include aviation, shipping and imports, UK emissions have fallen by only around 20 per cent since 1990.” And UK government targets claim “three times our fair share of the remaining global carbon budget”.

The solutions had to start not with “delay technologies” such as carbon capture, but with “timely technologies” such as public transport, electric vehicle charging for rural areas, retrofitting homes and a big programme of electrification.

Anderson’s statements reflects years of tension between political greenwash and research by the Tyndall centre and many others.

In 2018, as a cohort of young people in groups such as Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion expressed their fury at political inaction on climate, the Tyndall centre published “carbon budgets”, sharply-reducing amounts of carbon that national economies could put into the atmosphere if dangerous climate change was to be averted.

The Tyndall budgets were much smaller than the government’s, since they took into account the need for rich nations to cut emissions faster, and left out speculative amounts of “carbon removal” by carbon capture technology that does not work.

Inadequate

In London, campaigners (including the author of this article) pleaded in vain with City Hall to consider the Tyndall centre’s research before going ahead with the Silvertown Tunnel. 

We highlighted the gap between the emissions City Hall was planning for and the Tyndall centre’s carbon budgets. See Graph 3. Now, it has turned out that City Hall was not even planning to hit its insufficient targets. 

In 2022, when the Mayor announced his commitment to “net zero by 2030”, he commissioned research from Element Energy about how to achieve it. 

Element Energy offered three scenarios: the Mayor selected as optimal the medium one - “accelerated green”, that the consultants claimed could result in London’s greenhouse gas emissions being 78 per cent lower in 2030 than in 1990.

This highly optimistic forecast would have brought London roughly in line with the government’s inadequate targets. But no attempt was made to consider science-based targets – and nothing was done to reduce traffic volumes. 

Politicians

A proposal for road user charging was put out for consultation, but even before that was completed the Mayor announcedhe would not go down that path.

In any case, transport campaigners argued, reducing traffic would require a much bolder set of measures, including substantial investment in, and expansion of, public transport and active travel, on top of cutting the numerous subsidies for cars - such as investment in roads and parking spaces and the fuel duty freeze.

While City Hall, like national government, was retreating from its own inadequate targets, the scientists’ research-based targets were being further marginalized.

Kevin Anderson and his colleagues John Broderick and Isak Stoddard had published an article in 2020 showing that emissions reduction targets set by the UK and Sweden – often held up as shining examples of the necessary level of action – understated what needed to be done by “a factor of two”. 

Politicians took no notice.

Tempted

Where there was a little backbone in local government, and/or active campaign groups, the Tyndall centre carbon budgets, downloadable from the University of Manchester’s web site, were a useful guide. 

They have now been taken down: in a retrospective summary, Tyndall scientists Carly McLachlan and Chris Jones observed that local authorities “often find they do not have the levers, funds or political will to reduce emissions rapidly”.

They recommend that, above all, local politicians need to be straight with the public: “have a clear narrative that acknowledges previously set milestones might be missed”, they suggest, “but retain science and fairness-based targets to guide policy ambition”. 

Authorities that are missing their targets “might be tempted to incorporate carbon offset or negative emissions credits into their strategy”. Don’t do that, McLachlan and Jones advise.

Approaches to decarbonisation that work

This grim story of London’s transport sector targets could be told many times over, about other cities and national governments, and about housing, electricity supply, industry and the other systems that consume fossil fuels. 

The point of telling it is not to demoralise, but to illustrate how political machinery frustrates action. 

The most effective response is to build a movement that brings together the decarbonisation imperative with the battle against social injustice and for wider public provision – a movement that offers a vision of cities that are good to live in.  

Izzy Romilly of Possible told The Ecologist: “Action on the climate crisis is a no-brainer: it’s action for warmer homes, lower bills, good jobs, energy security, better health and more.” 

Priorities should include “targeted investment to get electric vehicles and e-cycles to those who need them the most, like taxi drivers, care workers and delivery riders, while supporting modal shift so we’re not just relying on electric vehicles to solve our problems”.

Direction

Possible’s recent briefing on Turning the tide against rising traffic calls for a road user charge, and shows that there is wide public support for reallocating road space away from cars, and shifting investment from road building to walking, cycling and public transport.

The expansion of public transport provision is also a central issue for trade unions, including those representing rail workers, who recently called for the tube to be brought under public ownership, and bus drivers.  

Fare Free London, a grass-roots campaign group, headlines the demand for free public transport, which has proved a powerful lever for social justice in the dozens of cities globally that have introduce it, and, as part of an integrated approach, could be a key element in the shift away from cars. 

The group has launched a pledge, signed by more than 100 councillors and candidates in the May elections, to use their platforms to support the principle of free provision.

This month’s increase in tube and rail fares in London was a political choice that “is going in completely the wrong direction”, Pearl Ahrens of Fare Free London said. 

Deception

“Increasing the proportion of income coming from fares has real costs for people who live in London, and it’s not necessary. 

“The transport systems in most of the world’s big cities rely far less on fare income than London’s does – more sustainable sources of funding can be drawn from elsewhere.”

Linking transport and housing issues is also essential, and a coalition of researchers last year set out in detail the potential of “vision-led planning” that offers alternatives to road building and car-dependent development.

These efforts will hopefully be brought together in social movements strong enough to challenge politicians’ inaction and deception. 

This Author

Dr Simon Pirani is honorary professor at the University of Durham in the UK, and author of Burning Up: A Global History of Fossil Fuel Consumption (Pluto, 2018). He writes a blog at People and Nature. You can follow Simon on BlueSky at @simonpirani.bsky.social‬.