Joss Garman, writing about the Greenpeace protest at Heathrow in the Guardian’s Comment is Free displays this publication’s invariable disregard for facts:
Climate change is the greatest danger to the world today.
Is it? Is it, really? The evidence is mixed at best – and, frankly, the climate has changed before and will again. The world will go on and adapt. Until, that is, the sun goes super nova. It is the demise of the sun, not human activity that will do for the Earth.
Anyway, this is a peach:
Aviation already accounts for 13% of the UK’s climate impacts and we fly more than any other country in the world. Greenpeace carefully chose to demonstrate on top of a plane that had flown from Manchester to illustrate that so many of these destinations are reachable more quickly and in greater comfort by train – which is over ten times less polluting.
If you check BA’s flight times, you will discover that it takes an hour to travel from Heathrow to Manchester. Now, if you check National Rail Enquiries, you will discover that a journey from London Euston to Manchester Piccadilly on a fast train takes three hours and eighteen minutes. How, exactly, is this quicker than flying?
When travelling to Edinburgh a couple of years back, I flew from Bristol – a journey of a little over an hour. By train this would have been six and a half hours. If I have to do the same trip again, I would fly again – my time is precious to me. The reason that domestic flights are popular is because they are quicker than travelling by rail – they can be cheaper, too if you book well ahead.
If Joss Garman is too stupid, lazy or ignorant to check even this simple fact, then the rest of his diatribe may be dismissed as bollocks.
Not defending Joss Garman’s environMentalism, but when it comes to journey times it’s not a reasonable comparison to compare train ride length with plane right length directly.
1) With trains you don’t have to get to the train station an hour before and queue to go through security and remove your shoes, and 2) airports tend to be further out of the city than train stations, meaning extra travel time at either side of the journey.
Uh, that should be “plane ride length” not “plane right length”. Obviously.
Sorry, but that is the only comparison you can make. You still have to get to the station, park your vehicle, buy tickets etc. What happens either side of the actual journey is neither here nor there as it is a variable not included in the actual journey. The out of town point only holds true if the traveller lives within the city environs. As we don’t know this, the journey time can only be measured from the station or airport – and it is reasonable to get there in sufficient time to buy tickets and get to the platform in time to catch the train, just as it is to check in for a flight.
From a regional airport such as Bristol, the security paraphernalia can be matter of a few minutes. I can assure you that Bristol to Edinburgh, Glasgow or Manchester is a damn sight quicker by plane than train – even with a check-in an hour before departure.
Joss presented fiction as fact. Even with the waiting around, the plane is quicker than the train. The worst example I can recall from a personal perspective was a serious delay at Edinburgh airport – I was flying back to Birmingham. Such was the delay, that the train that left Waverly at the same time I was in my taxi to the airport rolled into Birmingham International a few minutes after I hopped off the plane and arrived at the station. The plane was still (marginally) quicker than the train. Joss is factually wrong.
Longrider, you’re the expert on this, how do the CO2 emissions of trains and planes compare, once you include electricity generation and track maintenance and so on? Surely, the amount of steel-per-passenger-times-friction is much higher for trains? I personally prefer trains, but that’s my decision.
Mark Wadsworth’s last blog post..“Robed Obama picture ignites row”
Not that much of an expert, I’m afraid. That said, I suspect that Joss Garman has not taken into account the production of electricity (enviroloonies tend to assume that it is “clean”). On the Western, we have mostly diesel hauled stock and I couldn’t tell you what their CO2 is.
Actually when travelling to France, I use the train in preference to flying. This is partly because of the reduced security paranoia (although there’s still plenty of that) and partly because I don’t want to travel to Stanstead.