Cameras Go Up to Punish Drivers in the Name of Climate Change – Then Vigilantes Strike

A major city has instituted a draconian law to satisfy the climate change religion backed up by a mass surveillance camera network resulting in a defacto tax costing residents hundreds. And authorities are shocked that citizens are taking matters into their own hands by vandalizing and disabling the Big Brother cameras that monitor compliance.

Citizens of London are furious over the city’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) rules that renders a large section of the city practically inaccessible by car because there are very few vehicles that meet the draconian emissions standards that permit them to enter the zone, according to The Drive.

London city officials have designated a 147 square-mile sector as its pollution-free Ultra Low Emission Zone, supposedly to clean up the air quality in the city that was once derided as “The Big Smoke” due to its air pollution.

The idea is to discourage citizens from driving in this zone by charging them fines for driving the wrong kind of auto into the area. Officials hope that citizens will get the message and buy vehicles that have higher emission standards and stop using their older vehicles.

To achieve this, officials have set up a massive network of hundreds of cameras that monitor the streets and take photos of every car on the road. This photo is then compared to vehicle registrations which tell the computer system whether the license plate is on a car that meets the standards.

If the car does not meet the standards, the owner is sent a $15.88 fine per day. And if the fines are not paid, they will be charged an additional $288.71 on top of the missed fines.

Even worse, the ULEZ has no grandfather clause for people who live and work in the area and no immunity for them from the ULEZ rules.

In other words, citizens were instantly barred from driving to the grocery store, their schools, their church, or their jobs unless they want to pay an additional $16 a day fine.

This means that the second the ULEZ surveillance system was switched on, millions of residents were made instant climate change criminals whose only choices are to suffer a $16 a day tax/fine, to stop driving at all, or be forced to spend up to $50,000 or more to buy a new car, such as an electric vehicle, that meets the new ULEZ standards.

Naturally, residents are not amused.

The problem is about to get even worse because London’s city hall has announced that it intends to expand this zone to over 600 square miles and to include an additional five million residents next year — all of whom will similarly become instant criminals once the new zone takes effect.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan described the plan as “transformational” and was excited to announce that “five million more people will be able to breathe cleaner air and live healthier lives,” the Metro reported.

Some residents inside the ULEZ, though, are not sitting idly by and allowing city hall to oppress them with these draconian climate change rules.

A group calling themselves the “ULEZ blade runners” is striking back and has engaged in a massive act of civil disobedience by vandalizing, disabling, or blocking the Big Brother surveillance system with which Mayor Khan has burdened them.

One man who claims to belong to this group told the Daily Mail that he and his fellow blade runners are trying to “wake up the sleeping masses.”

“There are 24 hours in a day. We either fight it or accept it. We do whatever we can,” the man said. “What we will achieve by our actions is the removal of the infrastructure and waking up the sleeping masses to what is really going on.”

“We are going to take down every single one no matter what,” another protester told the paper.

Fed-up citizens have used cordless impact tools to actually remove the cameras and tote them away, they have cut wires to make them inoperable or somehow obscured the camera lenses by covering them by various means such as bags or paint splashes.

Officials reported that 96 cameras were affected in one way or another in May, but since then the police have mysteriously stopped reporting on the number of cameras damaged or blocked.

One London Metropolitan Police report had said that about a dozen cameras are being vandalized per week in the capital city of a nation increasingly trending towards authoritarianism.

Naturally, the police department has announced that it has created a new unit to track down such scofflaws in an effort the department is calling “Operation Eremon.” The LMP, though, did not elaborate on how this unit will operate and what methods it will sue to catch the vandals.

City hall is also trying to denigrate the blade runner groups as mere “vandals” who have no purpose other than to act like punks.

“It is deeply disappointing to see opposition to a policy being used as an excuse for criminal damage,” a city representative said. “This petty vandalism of London’s essential transport infrastructure is completely unacceptable.”

Clearly city hall does not want to admit that these residents have a legitimate beef with their out-of-control government as elites who are nearly unaffected by these draconian rules place huge burdens on the lower and middle classes and make the lives of citizens worse.

These pitiful attempts to satisfy the global warming high priests really have little to no impact on the climate, especially since these same elites utterly ignore — and even sanction — the far worse acts of climate destruction being wrought by China and in the third world.

This ULEZ policy is just more proof that the elites care more about their agenda than they do about the lives of their own citizens.

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.