Dear all - to people whose email addresses I have after last night's Zoom.
Bob told us this figure at our meeting yesterday. He is right. I heard it announced on Radio 4 later in the evening. This is really alarming. All because of our prodigious consumption of finite fossil fuels that are changing the planet's climates for the worse. Economic growth but ecological disaster. I'm writing this with no heating in the house but wrapped up warm, as usual. For the first time in 46 years, I had to fossil-fuel-free mow our tiny patch of lawn in November. When I do have to drive, I'm driving so fuel frugally I'm getting nearly 80 mpg and, it will have to be my last car.
I proposed that Bob should take up the suggestion that we write an open letter to the WMCA Board for their meeting in January. I think that was met with approval, with the letter being sent for checking by the rest of us, as Bob wanted. And we gather to lobby and present the letter to Andy Street at the Board meeting on 14 January 2022. It starts at 1100 hrs. We meet at 1030 hrs at the venue to be announced by the CA who will confirm the date. We must have XR there to provide banners and the band, if someone could invite them, I am suggesting.
THE URGENCY OF THE CRISIS
I am also asking that the letter from us all include our insistence that the CA abandon, immediately, the massive £500 m of greenhouse gases (GHG) for 10 Kms of the Wednesbury to Brierley Hill "bus on rails" tram extension (WBHE) on the 120 Kms Worcester to Derby mainline through Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall and south Staffordshire. There has only been preparatory work and no track laid, in over two years. Any cancellation fees are easily worth paying because of the enormity of the blunder in wrecking the Black Country Mainline that is needed to take freight and passenger trains from the "at capacity" railway lines and stations in Brum. What the TfWM/CA is doing is the most colossal oversight in putting light rail (LR), very light rail (VLR) and ultra-light rail (ULR) on a heavy rail line "of national strategic significance" (DfT letter, 8 March 2018), here:
Best wishes
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