Dear Fiona - and copied to Peter Sargant to confirm or correct me, please, where he is mentioned.
We met yesterday at the Ask Andy meeting. Andy wants your company and others to help finance and build HS2 - Brum to Manchester. Is that your understanding, Fiona? If so, I'm asking if you could ask your company to help in some or any way with halting the conversion of the UK's very last principal, mainline railway
being converted to tramway (Wednesbury to Brierley Hill) and cycle-walkway (Walsall to Lichfield). Please don't stay silent in the face of wrong priorities. Peter Sargant, Head of Rail and Rapid Transit Development•TfWM and WMRE, told me last Monday that the Black Country Railway was on their wish list but is at the very bottom in terms of priority!!
For me, more modest and highly energy efficient housing and land to grow food to feed us all must have priority over more motorways and high speed railway lines. Even HS2 has been cut back twice, despite the government’s desperation for growth/greed! Hence, the urgency of halting the further destruction of railway lines closed very properly by Beeching in the 60s and 70s and not turning them into roads, buildings and tramways.
Far more important and useful than HS2 is the 120 Kms Worcester, Black Country, Derby principal mainline railway “of national strategic significance”. It is both a north-south and an east-west railway because it runs from SW to NE, as you'll see in this map in Railfuture's leaflet. ROUTE: London, Oxford, Worcester, Black Country, Derby to relieve congestion on M5/M6:
Andy & co simply have to do exactly what Railfuture says here and forget HS2 that is for a very select clientele who simply want to travel between Old Oak Common and Curzon Street. Every intercity train must remain to serve those places HS2 is far too fast to stop at. Therefore, no gain in capacity! Yet, we can afford to spend over £50 billion in price and in weight of greenhouse gas emissions.
Below, is near Brownhills on the half used 120 Kms Black Country Railway, The unused section is the 56 Kms Stourbridge to Burton on Trent. Trams will run between Wednesbury and Flood Street, Dudley from 2024/5 to make it the world's first TRAIN-TRAM-CYCLE/WALKWAY-TRAIN mainline railway! This is the section that gets the planned cycle/walkway extension.
Below, the railway tracks have long since been nicked by metal thieves! Looking towards Lichfield. Every crossing of motorways, roads and canals are in place but, we never see the trains and stations!
MORE HERE, if you wish to read further:
My thoughts, below on why priorities are all important. Top priority is our wish to be stuck in traffic alongside or near the 120 Kms wasted railway!
There are the external costs of liquidating our assets and drinking deep from the chalice of rich finite fossil fuels that the climate scientists are telling us is a poisonous chalice.
Our forebears lived for thousands of years simply but sustainably. We in the rich North of the planet are living very richly and comfortably but unsustainably and very briefly in the geological time scale of things.
Financial costs of our activities do not accurately reflect the impact of our unsustainable and very energy rich lifestyles on the planet's life support systems, as Mrs Thatcher rightfully reminded us in 1988. She said "We have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself."
The blessed Margaret said that we must live within our means, our limits and our boundaries. How right she was but, such a pity she didn't put any of it into practice!
We never factor in any cost for the impact of our human activity on the planet's ecosystems. Never factor in the cost from the sheer numbers of us on the planet. Or, even on burning up a one off geological inheritance that took 350 million years to form, in about 350 years - 1750 to 2100. In other words, we get everything on the cheap without the slightest thought for how future generations are going to get on. Live now, pay later economics!
Our money, all our riches and all the wealth in the world, even our ever so smart technology can't change the weather from day to day or the climate from one season to another. Can't stop wildfires and floods or volcanoes erupting or sea levels rising as the Arctic melts and the glaciers disappear. We humans are so clever we invent and build WMD that can wipe us all out many times over and take every other life form with us, too!
So clever we can send our machines to far-flung planets in our solar system but find it impossible for us all to migrate to another planet once we've well and truly mucked up this one.
We can even calculate how our sister or twin planet has an atmosphere so concentrated in CO2 that some scientists say is from a runaway greenhouse effect, as we are probably doing to earth.
Foote and Tyndall in the 1850s showed how CO2 heats up more than air. However, we know better and we simply cross our fingers and hope for the best with all our rapid conversion of fossil fuels into CO2 to change the chemical composition of the atmosphere - and not for the better..
What is the matter with us extremely intelligent humans?!
From the 5 April to 22 August 2022 with Octopus, for my wife and I, total gas and electricity worked out at only 75p/day for the two of us. We just live frugally, simply but still very comfortably. And we both think we lack for nothing!
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