Aug 27 2007
Another climate change conference: going by train is not necessarily the answer.
It’s time for our representatives to jump on the jet planes and turn up the air conditioning at the luxury hotels. They are preparing for another world summit on climate change later this year. Yes, that’s right, it takes international junkets to try to find the son of Kyoto. Apparently they have not heard of the email, the web, the blackberry, the telephone, the conference call and fax, but need to meet in person with no sense of irony.
The EU of course will do what it did last time. It will urge tough targets, accept targets, and then carry on doing just what it has always done. If the targets are hit it will crow about it. If they are missed, it will grow quiet about the subject. The EU bureaucracy will not cancel a single fossil fuel contract, will not remove any air conditioning or heating system from its offices, will not cancel a single official car. It will condemn the USA for refusing to adopt targets that might not be hit, and will sit on its hands when posed with the difficult questions of what to do about India and China’s growing appetite for fossil fuels. It will not include the carbon belching forth from the Greek forest fires in its account of EU carbon output.
I find that many people I ask about the subject have been made cynical about the whole business, and just see it as another way to tax them. They have disliked the one sided nature of the debate on the BBC and elsewhere, the extreme spinning of the evidence from the scientific community, the elision of "global warming" and the substitution of "climate change" because it has been so cold this summer, the change of forecasts from warm wet winters and hot dry summers in the UK to wet cool summers and dry winters, and the recent discovery that the hottest summer in the last 100 years was 1934, not last year.
A recent survey has at the same time come up with the unremarkable conclusion that people do not use trains that often because it is difficult getting to the station and because the train timetables are inconvenient. The survey should have added that going by old fashioned heavy trains in the UK is often not a green answer either. If you have to queue in heavy traffic to get to the station and then go on a old train that is not even half full, pushing out dirty diesel exhaust, taking an old taxi at the other end, it is often less green than driving a modern car all the way. Highways departments and the Department of Transport have made it so difficult to get into city centres in the morning peak, yet that is where most of the stations are. Railway regulations and UK procurement practise require the trains to carry around twice as much weight as they need, and many of the older locomotives are dirty and inefficient.
It is time we had a proper green audit of the different ways of travel, taking an interest in end to end journeys so we can have an accurate picture of what is going on. Very few people just want to travel from station to station. I am sure such a survey would discover two very un green features of our rail travel. The first would be the congestion impeding us getting to the station,and the second would be the inefficient engines hauling the trains.
John Redwood has been the Member of Parliament for Wokingham since 1987. First attending Kent College, Canterbury, he graduated from Magdalen College...
I’d like to see a proper green audit of wind power generation as well. The audit needs to include the full life cycle cost, including building, transportation, maintenance and decommissioning of both the windmills and the extensions to the grid required for remote locations. Such an audit would also have to include how much electricity is actually be delivered to the grid rather than how much is generated at the windmill in perfect conditions. Finally the cost of having standby supply also needs to be factored in.
The figures I’ve seen for Germany and California suggest that windmills actually have a larger carbon footprint than modern coal power stations. If this is true, then all we are doing is paying taxes to give subsidies to large German and Danish corporations in order to degrade our environment!
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You are of course right about the EU!
But make a green audit? Why not sit at home watching “The Great Global Warming Swindle” and stop worrying about green issues. They should also study astronomy: Mars has *proven* global warming (unlike Earth) - so global warming is apparently a normal part of the life-cycle of a planet.
Reply: We need a proper green audit to help guide people to lower energy costs in an era of increasing energy prices - and also to prevent green folly by doing things that are expensive and inconvenient which also fail to cut energy usage in the way intended.
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This might sound selfish, but the way things are going makes me think more and more along the lines of buying a fast, gas-guzzling petrol car - because this might be the last opportuntiy I ever have to.
Oil prices are rising, tax on driving a fast car is headed in no direction but North. The revolution in diesel technology (largely thanks to German manufacturers) and the likelihood of hybrid technology achieving economies of scale against this back drop makes me think - “Hey, you can get a nice German V8 car now for
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Included in that “audit” of different modes of transport needs to be included the energy used to make the new cars - because it’s all very well for a new car to be more efficient but what about the energy used to make it instead of using the old less efficient car?
It’s not a trivial matter because Europe is churning out and importing vast numbers of new cars to replace perfectly good and repairable existing ones.
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Although often ineffectual and always undemocratic, the EU in this case is doing at least one useful thing - forcing use of efficient light bulbs which are better for the environment and the pocket (http://news.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id=380442007). I agree that it is not enough.
Your description of people’s perceptions is interesting and worrying. You can go back to the peer reviewed science, and try and get to the bottom of what is really being predicted (Mark Lynas’s “Six Degrees” book gives some references, and a summary). But it’s hard, as climatology is hard.
I’m sufficiently worried that I think it is worth acting with leadership to reduce carbon emissions anyway. I want to keep our society and our lifestyle. I care about our country. The stakes are high, and it doesn’t seem worth the risk.
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On the subject of audits, will the EU be publishing (and offsetting?) it’s carbon footprint for the conference? Perhaps not.
I can’t help thinking that trains are an outdated form of transport, which absorb a tremendous amount of capital to upkeep and perhaps are not as green as people think. Why not tear up the railways and replace them with something more appropriate for our age. Perhaps super buses that could connect to the existing road network and / or covered through-ways that could be used by eco-friendly two wheel transport.
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Trains are generally more efficient than cars (certainly than cars with only one or two people in). They reduce congestion and help our economy (can you imagine how London would function without fast trains coming into the centre?). As to their emissions, old trains might be not as good but modern diesel/electric and electric trains are very efficient. Also with electric trains you can start to move to renewables and or nuclear power, reducing the emissions and giving us energy independence from other countries. We can’t rely on petrol/diesel from other countries for very much longer. Britain has a lot of renewable energy. Let’s use it and stop shipping all our money overseas.
Reply: Modern trains that travel well loaded with passengers are clearly more fuel efficient, which is why the Competitiveness Report I have just launched looks at ways of adapting the technology to maximise use of the track with services people are likely to want to use, employing new more fuel efficient engines. However, we must also examine end to end journeys to see the true emissions picture, and look at the many trains operating at off peak times between less popualr destinations, where they are increasing the emissions problem. Electric trains burn much more gas and coal generated energy than renewable power, so we have to account for that pollution as well.
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