Somewhere between his references to Kermit the Frog and Sophocles during his recent speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations, Boris Johnson urged his clearly bemused listeners to ‘grow up’ and ‘listen to the warnings of the scientists’ because COP26 in Glasgow was ‘just 40 days away’ and it must be a ‘turning point for humanity’. But did his call for urgent action reach the Department for Transport?
When the ‘Plan for Rail’ was published in May, it told us that ‘rail produces only 1% of Great Britain’s transport emissions, despite carrying almost 10% of all passenger miles and nearly 9% of freight’, that ‘electrification is likely to be the main way of decarbonising the majority of the network’, so ‘electrification of the network will be expanded’.
It was quoting Network Rail’s Traction Decarbonisation Network Strategy, published in September 2020 – now over a year ago.
Despite acknowledging such apparently overwhelming evidence, still only ‘likely to be’ rather than ‘will be’. But the Plan for Rail assured us that further electrification projects in England would be announced ‘shortly’. The dictionary definition of shortly is ‘in a short time; soon’. Six months is definitely neither.
To be…
