Scrutable

Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 27, 2021 9:59 pm

I can't, off the top of my head, think of many case studies where things that contribute to climate change have been outright banned (because of their carbon contributions).

If anyone would like to suggest an example, I'll happily look into the likely carbon consequences.

Incandescent light bulbs. Fluorescents to follow. In the EU, this is, not globally. As is well known, coal is banned for power generation in Brtain from 2025, and this has resulted in a rapid exit of coal generators from the system, as they close rather than do major maintenance.

In many cases it is hard to just ban things. The main technique has been to require improvements in energy efficiency. This can be done at the individual equipment level, like white goods. Or industry level, like cars. The proposed regulations to force people to make efficiency improvements to their houses are rather controversial. Similarly proposals to ban the sale of domestic gas boilers in the near future.

IvanV wrote: ↑

Mon Jun 28, 2021 10:00 am

Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 27, 2021 9:59 pm

I can't, off the top of my head, think of many case studies where things that contribute to climate change have been outright banned (because of their carbon contributions).

If anyone would like to suggest an example, I'll happily look into the likely carbon consequences.

Incandescent light bulbs. Fluorescents to follow. In the EU, this is, not globally. As is well known, coal is banned for power generation in Brtain from 2025, and this has resulted in a rapid exit of coal generators from the system, as they close rather than do major maintenance.

In many cases it is hard to just ban things. The main technique has been to require improvements in energy efficiency. This can be done at the individual equipment level, like white goods. Or industry level, like cars. The proposed regulations to force people to make efficiency improvements to their houses are rather controversial. Similarly proposals to ban the sale of domestic gas boilers in the near future.

Ban coming for petrol and diesel engined cars.

In both those examples there are excellent alternatives. Worth remembering Boaf was suggesting banning domestic flights without investing in high speed rail.

Well, "at the same time as investing in high-speed rail, but before it's operational" is more accurate.

Short-haul internal flights within a smallish island should be about the easiest flights to sacrifice by 2030, especially now that surface transport to the continent has additional delays.

All I'm really saying is that HS2 doesn't count as a "green" project without additional bits of legislation which currently don't exist, and - as you suggest - are unlikely to in the future.

no projects do. however the uk’s transport carbon wedge definitely won’t be addressed unless there’s a significant increase in rail use. chicken & egg, or perfect being the enemy of good? you decide.

I suppose the environmental arguments around HS2 boil down to this.

Biodiversity wise, it's just bad, due to the direct net loss of both habitat area and, more importantly, connectivity. Not the worst thing happening in the UK or the world by any means, but opportunities to offset the damage or create something that's genuinely a net positive have been deliberately avoided.

Carbon wise, it definitely undermines the 2030 target - as well as the habitat loss (including the use of grasslands to plant forestry plantations, which won't replace the carbon stocks of grassland for decades if ever), there's the huge amount of concrete used in construction and it won't be operational by then anyway. It almost certainly won't have mopped those emissions up by the 2050 target either - it needs a lot of people to move from flights and fossil-powered cars, so carbon neutrality depends on grid decarbonisation (which is happening, but slowly) and continued growth in commuting (which may not happen), alongside a slow uptake of electric cars and buses (and at least on this front government inaction seems to be in HS2's favour). So overall HS2 may never become carbon neutral over it's 120 year life.

The range of scenarios under which it might contribute to the UK's Paris commitments seems very narrow indeed, but while there are legitimate criticisms of the carbon modelling used by HS2 Ltd. themselves I've not been able to find any other studies using a more plausible, nor "best-case-scenario", set of assumptions.

ffs

https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/m ... 098896.amp

Yeah, the DfT is f.cking woeful on this. TBH I thought it'd been news for some time. After everything that's happened, a serious cash injection into infrastructure projects would be the obvious thing to do, but the government is economically illiterate.

El Pollo Diablo wrote: ↑

Thu Jul 22, 2021 9:09 am

Yeah, the DfT is f.cking woeful on this. TBH I thought it'd been news for some time. After everything that's happened, a serious cash injection into infrastructure projects would be the obvious thing to do, but the government is economically illiterate.

The benefits of HS2 are rapidly being reduced to "20 mins quicker to get to London" as well. No network-wide capacity increase, no point in doing it.

A thread, from some environmentalists: https://twitter.com/Greens4HS2/status/1 ... 0910453761

Hopefully the delay will give them time to sort out decent habitat minimisation, mitigation and compensation properly. NGOs are quite happy to get back round the table for the next phases if HS2 Ltd. start taking things seriously.

Ah, part of the levelling up agenda, denying the north any benefits of the scheme. Every election, they promise to electrify the existing routes, then renege on it a couple of years later

Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 23, 2021 1:29 pm

Hopefully the delay will give them time to sort out decent habitat minimisation, mitigation and compensation properly. NGOs are quite happy to get back round the table for the next phases if HS2 Ltd. start taking things seriously.

They are hamstrung by the DfT who hold the purse strings. All sorts of lovely things, like dedicated cycle routes etc, were descoped. Natural England have signed off on it, so they're not breaking the law. It is what it is, which is still sh.t loads better than the alternatives going on at Highways England. Focus your attention on those causing the most harm, not the least.

plodder wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 23, 2021 1:31 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 23, 2021 1:29 pm

Hopefully the delay will give them time to sort out decent habitat minimisation, mitigation and compensation properly. NGOs are quite happy to get back round the table for the next phases if HS2 Ltd. start taking things seriously.

They are hamstrung by the DfT who hold the purse strings. All sorts of lovely things, like dedicated cycle routes etc, were descoped. Natural England have signed off on it, so they're not breaking the law. It is what it is, which is still sh.t loads better than the alternatives going on at Highways England. Focus your attention on those causing the most harm, not the least.

That's the real problem here. Green infrastructure should be doing more than meeting the bare minimum required by an underfunded, politically interfered-with regulator.

On paper, Highways England national-level commitments look more ambitious than those of HS2, for instance delivering net gain for biodiversity rather than HS2's net loss. The devil will be in the details of individual local schemes, overseen by county ecologists (with even less budget and even more interference), which makes it much harder to target a national campaign against. Is there any national-level assessment of impacts from HE schemes?

But I don't think it's unfair to expect HS2 to at least pretend to try to have as little impact on habitats as road-building. Which means NE f.cked up or were overruled.


As for me personally, I'm fairly happy to trust that the entire conservation sector of the UK knows more about conservation than either of us, and they (one Twitter account notwithstanding) are unanimous in opposing the details of the current scheme. I'm focusing my own energy on a project worse than both (an airport in an SPA wetland), and leaving the UK to sort its own sh.t out (or not as the case will probably be).

I think both of you should probably just have some cut & paste responses you post at regular intervals tbh

El Pollo Diablo wrote: ↑

Mon Jul 26, 2021 10:14 am

I think both of you should probably just have some cut & paste responses you post at regular intervals tbh

Yes, I got a sense of déjà vu writing that.

I read Simon Jenkins' latest turd on a keyboard so you don't have to. Nothing new.

El Pollo Diablo wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 30, 2021 2:11 pm

I read Simon Jenkins' latest turd on a keyboard so you don't have to. Nothing new.

Your comment intrigued me, so I googled it and read it. Thanks.

The apparent cancellation of the northern section is new, though - or do you reckon it'll be back on the cards at some point? The case does seem a bit weaker if it stops at Birmingham.

Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 30, 2021 9:13 pm

El Pollo Diablo wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 30, 2021 2:11 pm

I read Simon Jenkins' latest turd on a keyboard so you don't have to. Nothing new.

The apparent cancellation of the northern section is new, though - or do you reckon it'll be back on the cards at some point?

plodder and EPD have already mentioned that upthread.

basementer wrote: ↑

Sat Jul 31, 2021 6:11 am

Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 30, 2021 9:13 pm

El Pollo Diablo wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 30, 2021 2:11 pm

I read Simon Jenkins' latest turd on a keyboard so you don't have to. Nothing new.

The apparent cancellation of the northern section is new, though - or do you reckon it'll be back on the cards at some point?

plodder and EPD have already mentioned that upthread.

I meant new in the context of journalists spouting off about HS2. The stuff about how eye-wateringly expensive it is has been done before, but the stuff about "leveling up" the north is newish (or was to me) in light of recent announcements.

I don't think Simon Jenkins reads the forum. And the brief mention upthread didn't answer my question anyway.

Simon Jenkins is a bad journalist and a bad opinion holder generally, and the worst of all his opinions is about HS2. He's been very regularly and deliberately untruthful about it for the last ten or eleven years, often reading anything as pessimistically as possible.

The Manchester arm of HS2 is pretty much definite, it's just taking some time. That'll be what gets legislated for next, I think, with the hybrid bill due to be put before parliament (I believe) early next year. So unless Jenkins' definition of "the North" includes Leeds and excludes Manchester, then he's wrong.

The Leeds arm is under more scrutiny right now, but I just cannot see how it makes any sense at all to not build it. If they don't build it, they lose the benefits to the ECML and MML, they tell the people of the East Midlands, the North East and Yorkshire that they don't give a sh.t about them, they give Labour a very strong stick to hit them with, the "red wall" will be jeopardised, and the levelling up agenda will look dead on arrival.

So I reckon he's wrong about that as well.

Jenkins' continued career is something of a mystery.

Thanks for the clarification about the Manchester line. And yes, I hope the Leeds branch isn't permanently mothballed, though my levels of hope for the current UK government not doing something monumentally stupid and self-defeating are somewhat subterranean at this stage.

We need to talk about Kevin British railway construction costs.

Just in case you don't get how sodding ridiculous and upsetting this is, and how impotent I feel about it, here is a graph in this week's Economist that shows the extent of my sadness. Even the High speed line that includes the longest railway tunnel in the world, running 57.5km underneath the Alps, has a much lower unit cost than HS2.

Is that to do with property prices in southern England, labour costs or what?

Under $250/km sounds like a bargain to me

How comparable are those other projects? Are they completely new lines or do they follow existing routes?