Scientists trace heat waves back to individual fossil fuel companies, with potentially sweeping courtroom implications

[sgt_woulds]

1 hour ago, ProDave said:

Kind of ironic that as we discuss this we hear of the new Runways for Gatwick and Heathrow approved and a near doubling of flight numbers.

 

So while we are all being encouraged to go green with our vehicles and houses "the message" is it's okay still to fly long distances and we are enabling more and more flights to take place.

 

Again, I have little confidence anyone has a proper plan other than try and tick a few boxes.

 

 

I expect to see Boris lying in front of a bulldozer any day now....

 

Perhaps a quota of Air miles per UK citizen, above which an additional TAX is due?  How many business meetings could be better conducted via a video call.   

 

Personally, I'd love to travel by train across the UK and into Europe, but the economics make it impossible.  The fact that you can fly from Luton to Edinburgh for a third of the cost of a train ticket shows how unfairly subsidised the aviation industry is.  

 

 

[Crofter]

39 minutes ago, sgt_woulds said:

 

 

I expect to see Boris lying in front of a bulldozer any day now....

Yes, that was one of his election pledges wasn't it? I'm amazed that he has any politically credibility whatsoever after reneging on that.

 

 

39 minutes ago, sgt_woulds said:

 

Perhaps a quota of Air miles per UK citizen, above which an additional TAX is due?  How many business meetings could be better conducted via a video call.   

The Tories actually proposed this many years ago, and it struck me as a very sensible and progressive thing to do. I suppose I'm politically a bit of a utilitarian- the greatest happiness for the greatest number. A family's annual holiday in the sun means a lot more to them than some rich person's fifth such trip that year.

Obviously the idea never made it anywhere near being a manifesto pledge, let alone a law.

 

39 minutes ago, sgt_woulds said:

 

Personally, I'd love to travel by train across the UK and into Europe, but the economics make it impossible.  The fact that you can fly from Luton to Edinburgh for a third of the cost of a train ticket shows how unfairly subsidised the aviation industry is.  

 

 

France have the right idea with their switch to trains for all travel under two hours. But then again they have a functioning rail system, not a privatised mess like us.

[LnP]

2 hours ago, ProDave said:

Again, I have little confidence anyone has a proper plan other than try and tick a few boxes.

I feel a bit the same way, but was encouraged by what Emma Pinchbeck, CEO of the Climate Change Committee, said in this interview on The Rest is Politics Leading.

 

And the Climate Change Committee's Seventh Carbon Budget talks a lot of sense. Up to now Parliament has accepted the CCC's carbon budgets, but has not yet voted on this one.

 

The framework for this is the Climate Change Act (2008) which was quite clever in the way it empowers the market to take advantage of changing technologies (with their changing costs) and avoided prescribing the path to Net Zero.

 

At the same time, I'm coming round to agreeing with people who say we're better to target Net 5% or Net 10%, because the last 5 or 10% could be prohibitively expensive.

[Roger440]

5 hours ago, Crofter said:

Yes, that was one of his election pledges wasn't it? I'm amazed that he has any politically credibility whatsoever after reneging on that.

 

 

The Tories actually proposed this many years ago, and it struck me as a very sensible and progressive thing to do. I suppose I'm politically a bit of a utilitarian- the greatest happiness for the greatest number. A family's annual holiday in the sun means a lot more to them than some rich person's fifth such trip that year.

Obviously the idea never made it anywhere near being a manifesto pledge, let alone a law.

 

France have the right idea with their switch to trains for all travel under two hours. But then again they have a functioning rail system, not a privatised mess like us.

 

Except for freight, we dont have a privatised railway. Network rail is owned by the state. The train operators that are left only do EXACTLY what the Dft tells them to do. In return they get a % margin. Until the franchise runs out, then it return to DfT.

 

Its not privatised anymore at all. 

[Roger440]

5 hours ago, sgt_woulds said:

 

 

I expect to see Boris lying in front of a bulldozer any day now....

 

Perhaps a quota of Air miles per UK citizen, above which an additional TAX is due?  How many business meetings could be better conducted via a video call.   

 

Personally, I'd love to travel by train across the UK and into Europe, but the economics make it impossible.  The fact that you can fly from Luton to Edinburgh for a third of the cost of a train ticket shows how unfairly subsidised the aviation industry is.  

 

 

 

Im not sure it unfairly subsidised.

 

Railways, which are infrastructure heavy, so have huge cost overheads. 

 

Aviation simply doesnt have that, by the nature of what it is.

 

Railways are already massively subsidised. Multiple times what it was under BR.

 

All acedemic, because our railway is mostly full. There is no realistic prospect of a big increase in capacity, because it is the size it is. Making it bigger, or more accurately, adding substantial capacity isnt realistic, see HS2 for details.

 

There isnt going to be a big transfer of passengers from air to rail because rail couldnt cope. Air to bus or car, maybe.

[-rick-]

9 minutes ago, Roger440 said:

Im not sure it unfairly subsidised.

 

Railways, which are infrastructure heavy, so have huge cost overheads. 

 

Aviation simply doesnt have that, by the nature of what it is.

 

Railways do indeed have a lot of infrastructure and it's not a simple matter to compare them. However, Aviation does have a lot of 'unfair' advantages and indirect subsidies. For example:

- aircraft fuel is tax free, railways pay for their fuel

- a lot of airports have received significant public funding/tax advantages (more so outside the UK than inside so advantage not as big for domestic flights)

- domestic flights are at least somewhat subsidised by long haul carriers in this country (even if you fly a small carrier that doesn't directly benefit, they will likely be able to offer low prices off the back of capacity initially built for the bigger, long-haul carriers.

 

9 minutes ago, Roger440 said:

Railways are already massively subsidised. Multiple times what it was under BR.

 

Personal belief with no data to back it up: subsidies are so high because the government over the last 10 years or so have badly managed the railways in a penny-wise, pound foolish way. HS2 is the exception, the problems there are different.

 

9 minutes ago, Roger440 said:

All acedemic, because our railway is mostly full. There is no realistic prospect of a big increase in capacity, because it is the size it is. Making it bigger, or more accurately, adding substantial capacity isnt realistic, see HS2 for details.

 

HS2 has been a disaster no doubt and a painful lesson. We should learn those lessons and continue investments. Globally there are large numbers of countries successfully deploying rail infrastructure, we are an outlier and I don't think we should throw our hands up and say 'wahh it's tooo haaarrrd, i'm giving up'. Scaling back ambitions to smaller, more easily delivered stuff does make sense though. Part of the problem with HS2 was the attempt to be 'world-beating' which politicians in this country seem obsessed by.

 

[Roger440]

2 minutes ago, -rick- said:

 

Railways do indeed have a lot of infrastructure and it's not a simple matter to compare them. However, Aviation does have a lot of 'unfair' advantages and indirect subsidies. For example:

- aircraft fuel is tax free, railways pay for their fuel

- a lot of airports have received significant public funding/tax advantages (more so outside the UK than inside so advantage not as big for domestic flights)

- domestic flights are at least somewhat subsidised by long haul carriers in this country (even if you fly a small carrier that doesn't directly benefit, they will likely be able to offer low prices off the back of capacity initially built for the bigger, long-haul carriers.

 

 

Personal belief with no data to back it up: subsidies are so high because the government over the last 10 years or so have badly managed the railways in a penny-wise, pound foolish way. HS2 is the exception, the problems there are different.

 

 

HS2 has been a disaster no doubt and a painful lesson. We should learn those lessons and continue investments. Globally there are large numbers of countries successfully deploying rail infrastructure, we are an outlier and I don't think we should throw our hands up and say 'wahh it's tooo haaarrrd, i'm giving up'. Scaling back ambitions to smaller, more easily delivered stuff does make sense though. Part of the problem with HS2 was the attempt to be 'world-beating' which politicians in this country seem obsessed by.

 

 

Minor point, but Railways buy red diesel, so much lower tax. Of course this only affects diesel operated trains. Lots of electric trains out there. Essentially, all the heavily used bits. Its not really going to make any meaningful difference. Its the government thats buying it!

 

If you charged airlines tax on fuel, they would simply, mostly, fill up elsewhere.

 

Those other countries didnt get rid of their ability to build stuff. We did. Its not coming back. All the experience has gone.

 

And Network Rail is an utter disaster area. No one wastes money better.

 

Respectfully, if you want to understand the challenges, a subscription to modern railways mag would be money well spent. Written by sensible, knowledgable people.

 

It will probably depress you, given how good we were at it once, but you will then understand why large scale increase in rail travel is simply impossible in this country.

[-rick-]

14 minutes ago, Roger440 said:

Minor point, but Railways buy red diesel, so much lower tax. Of course this only affects diesel operated trains. Lots of electric trains out there. Essentially, all the heavily used bits. Its not really going to make any meaningful difference. Its the government thats buying it!

 

Airlines don't pay VAT either AFAIK railways do. Fuel is a relatively small part of a railways cost but is a big big part of the cost of the flight. If Airlines did have to pay taxes on fuel their competitiveness would be a lot worse.

 

14 minutes ago, Roger440 said:

If you charged airlines tax on fuel, they would simply, mostly, fill up elsewhere.

Indeed

 

14 minutes ago, Roger440 said:

Those other countries didnt get rid of their ability to build stuff. We did. Its not coming back. All the experience has gone.

 

Have we knowledge and skills? sure. All of it, absolutely not. Part of the HS2 project was to set up training schemes for new hires and also it was timed to try and keep workers who were working on Crossrail employed in the rail industry. We have a bad habit in this country of training people up to do a job, then employing them for that one job where they make all the mistakes and then we don't have something for them to go on to next, so they end up going abroad where they don't make the same mistakes because they've learned.

 

From what I understand (and I've not been paying anywhere near as much attention as I used to) the actual construction part of HS2 has been relatively smooth. The project has been a disaster because of the planning, environmental and political aspects.

 

14 minutes ago, Roger440 said:

And Network Rail is an utter disaster area. No one wastes money better.

 

Thames Water is in the running! Also, it's always worth pausing and thinking when you see waste: 'Is that waste caused by bad management or is that caused by constraints imposed on management by forces beyond their control?'. I'm sure Network Rail has plenty of poor management, but again the impression I have is a lot of things are done a certain way because of the structure of the industry, DfT orders, etc.

 

14 minutes ago, Roger440 said:

Respectfully, if you want to understand the challenges, a subscription to modern railways mag would be money well spent. Written by sensible, knowledgable people.

 

I used to read it fairly regularly. Been a while though and I have enough other things going on that I'm unlikely to go back soon.