Remember when the environment was important?
Pan Up
A few years ago you could ‘sell’ almost any idea on the basis of saving carbon dioxide emissions.
I called it ‘Rail’s big chance’ – which it was, but predictably the industry blew it. Strictly speaking Network Rail blew it, but as an old boss of mine used to say, ‘we are where we are’. We had a lot of bosses like that in my day; this particular one had a two-page list of meaningless phrases. Who wrote that I wonder?
The chosen measure for the passenger railways saving the world was the carbon emission per passenger km, which was very convenient, as passenger numbers were going up and a rolling programme of electrification was starting. In this world we could go on building heavier, less efficient trains and still flash our green credentials.
Now let me say right now that we couldn’t actually make any real difference. Even if you closed the UK railways for a year and the ex-passengers lived in caves, you would only save about an hour’s worth of global CO2 output, but it was all about doing your bit.
Sensibly we should be pushing for modal transfer, but that is too difficult, so the chosen method is to take an arbitrary percentage off everyone. That suite…
