If you listen on, I will tell you why my proposal will help sort out some of this air pollution.

We can’t rely on the UK Government to sort this out. They’ve already suffered two humiliating defeats in the High Court, and the latest plan is even weaker and wobblier than their earlier ones. It requires local authorities to exhaust all other options before introducing clean air zones, enabling them to charge for polluting vehicles entering a polluting zone when that, in fact, is the only effective option for changing things. Instead, the Tories are saying we should just breathe in toxic air until 2050, when nearly every car and van will be zero emissions, by which time many of us will be dead. So, I think we could pilot a carbon tax in areas that already have illegal levels of air pollution, like the centre of Cardiff around Westgate Street and Newport Road. We urgently need a clean air zone. Cardiff is one of the most car-bound capitals in Europe, and we absolutely need to re-engineer the investment that we need to make in a public transport system to enable people to switch to other modes of less damaging transport. At the moment, the Cardiff underground map is little more than a piece of artwork, rather than being a plan with enough capital identified to make it really happen. So, the quickest, fairest way of making clean technology competitive with fossil fuels is simply for carbon to start paying its true costs. A fee starting at £10 per tonne of carbon dioxide emitted, increasing by £7 a tonne each year, could quickly make clean energy the cheapest go-to choice. A revenue stream rebated equally to all households would fuel demand for new carbon neutral technologies and cushion lower income households during the transition. Those who already tread lightly on the world’s resources, particularly those who don’t have a car, would actually gain a dividend from this carbon tax. It would be socially just that those without a car would be rewarded rather than penalised as they are at the moment. As both the fee and the household dividend rise steadily each year, a clear economy-wide price signal is sent to all investors, generating even more capital to finance new, low-carbon alternatives. The clean technology needed to power our economy already exists. A levy on carbon will provide the economic incentive for investors to deliver those technologies to scale. So, let’s deliver on the well-being of future generations Act and make it a reality with a carbon tax.