This piece is written by Jonathan Smales, Executive Chairman of Beyond Green.

Good friend and Beyond Green associate Paul Murrain mailed me a copy of an AP release yesterday reporting the alarming increase in greenhouse gases between 2009 and 2010. Apparently the rise of 6% is the fastest increase on record, equivalent to an extra 564 million tons of carbon which itself is a number bigger than the emissions form all but three of the world’s countries – China, the US and India (link to article HERE).  This is a sign of ‘how feeble the world’s efforts have been at slowing man-made global warming’. One commentator, Chris Field from Stanford, asks in the light of this astonishing increase whether we might need to look beyond the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) ‘worst case scenarios’ for global climate to ‘something more extreme’.

But rather than look beyond the IPCC let’s look a little closer to home. After a tiring day at work and despite the grim news on carbon (which actually was no big surprise) rather than stay at home and do something sensible (and low carbon) like read or listen to music, my partner and I drove to the cinema in Tunbridge Wells. Normally when we go out we travel 5 miles to the lovely cinema on the high street in Uckfield but we wanted to see Stephen Soderbergh’s ‘Contagion’. The journey turned out to be a horror show cameo of how mixed up and plain stupid things have become with regard to the messy but vital trinity of travel, town planning and carbon.

At first we couldn’t get out of the drive of our house because cars were speeding along the road through the village with its token 30 mph speed limit at what must have been at least 50 mph; presumably they were in enthusiastic pursuit of former Transport Secretary Phillip Hammond’s advice cum admonition, offered in defence of his proposal to increase motorway speed limits to 80 mph, to ‘get into the fast lane of the global economy’.

Arriving eventually in Tunbridge Wells we were sent on a cook’s tour of the town wiggling this way and that for mile upon mile, exploring all manner of suburbs and dead ends. After several wrong turns we found ourselves lost! Stranded, bemused and spooked in a giant, out-of-town, hybrid shopping centre, business park, entertainment complex. With no obvious landmarks (all the glass and steel sheds look exactly the same but for the luminous corporate logos polluting the night sky), normal
street patterns nowhere to be seen, legibility zero, people nil, alienation at max, we jiggled around haplessy until miraculously after half-an-hour of disorientation and lots of iPhone wayfinding we ’arrived’ at the cinema. At first we weren’t sure it was a cinema – it could have been a car showroom, a tile centre or perhaps a Staples. Surrounded by a vast car park with row upon row of cars  (but still strangely no people to be seen) we made our way to the garish entrance to be greeted by massed ranks of snacks, sweets and video games illuminated by a power station load of garish lighting. Still no people.

Now, apparently, Tunbridge Wells used to have a charming cinema in its centre, close to proper cafes and restaurants, shops, bus routes and the like. But at some point in the last 20 years the town spewed important parts of itself into that carbon hungry, car-frenzied, car-dependent, hybrid business park jobbie. With transport representing c.25% of our carbon footprints (and growing) how can there be any place for these no-place, remote, soulless, commercial theme parks. They take the heart out of towns, create congestion, destroy character, reduce social interaction and drive up carbon emissions. What’s the opposite of ’win-win’? If they can be allowed in a beautiful town like Tunbridge Wells (where one of the MPs, Greg Clarke is a Planning/Localism Minister in government incidentally), what chance elsewhere? And what do we do with them once carbon has a proper price and people can no longer afford the frequent private travel. ‘Re-purposing’ (as the Americans say) one of those monsters is beyond belief. Except maybe the sheds could be used for carbon capture? Or maybe we could move into these sealed environments as safe havens when the climate outside in real places has become too fierce?

The film was rubbish incidentally. Don’t go. and especially don’t go there.