A102 southbound queue
Greenwich Council’s support for the Silvertown Tunnel, which will feed into this jam, has been a sticking point with campaigners

The outgoing and incoming deputy leaders of Greenwich Council will speak at an online meeting of Extinction Rebellion next week to discuss the town hall’s plans to cut carbon emissions to net zero in 10 years.

David Gardner, the current deputy leader, and Denise Scott-McDonald, who will replace him next Wednesday, will talk at Extinction Rebellion Greenwich’s Climate Breakdown Shakedown, a discussion about the council’s climate emergency plan on Tuesday 12 May.

Councillors agreed on the evidence base for a climate emergency plan in January. Now Extinction Rebellion Greenwich hopes to push the council into meeting its commitment and going beyond beyond that – and will discuss what the council can actually do within the limitations placed on it by government.

Extinction Rebellion had tried to persuade the council to declare a climate emergency in March 2019 – the same night Lewisham declared one – but Scott-McDonald shrugged off the demand, saying “different councils have different definitions of what an emergency is”.

Greenwich eventually followed suit four months later, but the ensuing council debate studiously avoided mentioning the Silvertown Tunnel, a road project which it had supported and still has not formally stated any opposition to, despite council leader Danny Thorpe asking London mayor Sadiq Khan to pause and review the project in a letter sent last year.

Gardner and Scott-McDonald will be joined by Andrew Pendleton of the New Economics Foundation and Chloe Jeffries of Climate Emergency Manchester in the discussion.

The meeting will be conducted via a Zoom chat, and will begin at 7pm. Free tickets are available from Eventbrite.

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