Back in 2004, Lancaster University’s Professor Roger Kemp, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Engineering, produced a report for the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, on the environmental impact of high-speed rail versus air and car travel. He used the example of the London to Edinburgh route to illustrate his findings. The conclusions were startling and rather annoying for the car hating Green fundamentalists.

With electricity generated from fossil fuels:

• Travel by conventional rail contributes as much to global warming as travel by car
• Over a 600 km sector, travel by high speed rail is as environmentally unfriendly as air travel
• Cars are more fuel efficient than planes or trains. Cars are greener.

Source : www.engineering.lancs.ac.uk/research/download/Environmental impact.pdf

Trains are heavy, get their energy inefficently down wires where much of the energy is lost and are fundamentally a nineteenth century point-to-point technology belonging to a slower era. Cars are light, fuel efficient, and a liberating, flexible form of transport suited to modern life. Greens hate them so much because they are ideologically opposed to capitalist modes of consumption. So why are the Tories giving headspace to this anti-Car, anti-Air travel nonsense with their penalty tax proposals?