Mar 17 2007
Should you fly or go by train to Cornwall?
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John Redwood has been the Member of Parliament for Wokingham since 1987. First attending Kent College, Canterbury, he graduated from Magdalen College...
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It is even trickier that that. You get to the train station but discover that the train you are planning to travel on is half empty. Do you?
a) Get on the train and live with the guilt.
b) Persuade the other passengers to take taxis instead.
c) Hold a sit-down protest in front of the train until the train is full.
d) Go home and have a cup of solar heated tea. Note: tea bag needs to be eaten to save landfill.
Please no more subsidies for trains. If you have two or more people in a car your “carbon footprint” will be less than catching a train. Cars are becoming increasingly efficient whereas trains still live in a 1970’s time-warp.
I have my own weird solution to cut down our CO2.
I will be getting some of my info from a Civil Aviation Authority report which you can read here:
http://www.caa.co.uk/docs/33/CAP763.pdf
In 2004 there were 3,670,000 (see page 93). My proposal would be put a cap on the number of flights each year. The first time we could cap the amount of flights at 3.5 million which isn’t decreasing it much and it would be putting it to around 1999 levels.
Once the cap has been put on it you then auction off these journeys in 5%s putting a cap at around 15% so as not to create a monopoly. The bidders would of course be aeroplane companies. Once 85% of them have been auctioned off another 10% would be auctioned off to the smaller aeroplane companies in 2%s. The last 5% would not be auctioned off at first until the year started. When it did the 5% would be traded per journey and sold for the market price (whatever the average price was for each journey at the auction). After 1 month the other companies can sell off the journeys that they had bid on in a journey trading scheme.
Reducing the number of journeys would decrease CO2 and it wouldn’t harm the airlines because they would decide on their own tax which would be what they could afford.
This would also probably reduce Airprox’s (see pg 89 for definition but they are essential
JR: “Should you fly or go by train to Cornwall?”
There are three conclusions we can draw from this post.
We are seeing a sort of mass psychosis among the policical class and indeed in the population at large, if there is support for this sort of drivel.
Redwood has been taken behind the bike shed and given a good beating by Cameron, for the embarasment of the Today program earlier in the week.
Politicians are spinless and absolutely no use to man nor beast.
Reply - what nonsense! I have not been “spoken to ” about the Today interview. I suggest you read my piece again - it was
JR: “I suggest you read my piece again”
Firstly, I apologise, you are right, I did not read the article properly.
I had just finished listening to a recording of ‘This Week’ the usually tolerable political commentary on Thursdays on BBC1, where for some mysterious reason they had invited Alex James of Blur (Blur!!) to tell us how to be green. Any time he was asked a question, he practically froze, yet he was given the respect due to someone who knew what he was talking about.
Anyway, after watching the recording I read your latest blog entry, through the red haze of rage, all I could make out was CO2… CO2 … CO2.
It is a needless concession to Greenery to even couch the argument in those terms, for example you say, “…or what the CO2 ratings of the taxis and buses from stations and airports are likely to be”, a cue for the greenoids to force all taxis ( mostly privately operated ) to have their vehicles display ‘green’ ratings, at the expense of the owner of course. You don’t in this article mention that the excise duty on fuel is obscenely high, and thus the car or taxi journey is already contributing the most efficient green tax.
“The greens are right that if we simply have fewer planes and trains going to places less CO2 will be pushed out,”
Surely, Tories should be making the point that reducing/rationing flights would lead to fewer jobs in the airline industry, levying VAT on airline fuel in the UK - a suggestion I have heard this week - would lead airlines to fill up in Paris, Dublin, Amsterdam first, leading to a worse service to the passenger, what is now a direct flight might be involve a refueling stop.
If HGV lorries fill up on the continent first, what is to stop Airlines doing the same when our avaiation fuel is 17% more expensive than theirs. Finally, I believe I am right that VAT is not a british government competence, we just collect it for the EU.
Even discussing how much CO2 is generated, for a given journey is a needless concession to the Greenoids, CO2 is their argument, there is a good chance it is baseless. Until it is proven, Tories ought to confront and contradict the argument at every opportunity. The Tory party has been far too conciliatory on too many issues, too often, that and the fact that there are too many socialists in its ranks has been its downfall.
Regards
APL
John,
What is interesting is that it is not the plane that is the main polluter but the car.
ON AVERAGE a car produces 0.36Kg of CO2 per mile, an economy seat on a short haul flight 0.29 Kg of CO2 per mile, the train around 0.1 - so only if the car is full does it compare with the train.
I find the comment “It will help if the train is carrying lots of passengers, for then the CO2 attributable to your share of the journey will be low.” misleading. The train will go regardless of whether or not you are on it, so in reality the incremental CO2 produced is nearly zero if you take the train. The same goes for the plane - so it is always preferrable for people to use public transport regardless over the car.
Incidentally the problem at the moment is not empty trains but rather the opposite, overcrowded trains - if you don’t believe me take a train from Reading to Paddington sometime. The fix for this is not nessecarily more trains but often longer trains are what is required.
Andy W: “…main polluter but…”
For those who insist on describing CO2 as a polutant. It is not..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthesis
“Photosynthesis (photo=light, synthesis=putting together), generally, is the synthesis of glucose from sunlight, carbon dioxide and water, with oxygen as a waste product.”
Notice, in the description of photosynthesis, Oxygen is described as a waste product. Let’s hear it for the Greenoids to advocate Oxygen trading. Once upon a time it was a joke to say, “the bloody government, they will tax the air you breath if they could”, the rascals they have found a way to do it. That is exactly what ‘Carbon credits’ are, a tax on the air you breath.
Technology has addressed all the concerns of the Greenoids, we have lean burn engines, to reduce sulphur oxide(s) emissions in exaust fumes. We have introduced catalytic converters to fully oxidise CO, a poisenous by product of combustion. These days most internal combustion engines are so clean the only things they produce are Carbon Dioxide and Water. Both of which are in their purest form and certanly not polutants.
Only travel to places where the train line is electrified. Then decide that your section of the train is being moved by our nuclear electricity (20% of the total) or the 5% we import from French nuclear but which isn’t counted as nuclear when the electrons cross the channel. Thus no CO2 is produced.
Alternately trust the market that usually when something is cheaper it is because it uses less resources. Amazing the way money passes on economic signals.
Neil Craig mentioned that nuclear energy produced no Co2. Not entirely accurate. It’s true that no Co2 is produced at the power plant, but huge amounts of fossil fuel are used in mining, excavation, transportation, and refining nuclear ore.
And, any new power plants will take anywhere from about 10 to 15 years of operation to make back the energy (and C02) used in construction. Cement, concrete and steel have tremendous amounts of embodied energy.
Not to mention the need to deal with nuclear waste and the potential for terrorist acts or weapon making.
If we need to make steam, there are much more benign ways (like solar trough technology) than using a radioactive isotope - U235 with a half life of 700 million years.