"Climate campaigners should block road-building not HS2"

[whole diary]

[Rhydgaled]

As for 5G I think the challenges many people have had working from home with partners working as well and kids playing video games and watching 4K content do suggest that we need to invest in infrastructure. It would be nice if it was a bit more even though and I could get more than 1MB where I am in rural Wales. We've only just come in reach of 4G so 5G seems unlikely but I can see the argument for it.

One example in the media where I work is that we've been able to replace an outside broadcast truck with a people carrier and so on and eventually getting to the point where bonded SIMs in cameras are all that's needed for some situations. 5G only improves that.

I can see the benefits of investing in digital infrastructure. As you say, home working and schooling is much easier if you have high-quality broadband infrustructure, and indeed may not be practical without such infrustructure. Living in rural Wales myself, for years we were stuck with around 500kbps at best; then the national fibre rollout reached us and it has made a hell of a difference (they must have installed at least a mile of fibre optic cable for just two houses!) But I do almost all my computing at home/work; I don't see the need for similar connectivity on-the-go (although I must admit your outside broadcast scenario is one I didn't think of) and doesn't 4G offer a reasonable speed - would rolling that out more widely be more helpful than 5G?

Because we need a massive modal shift of freight from road to rail if we are to meet our climate change targets.

We may not. In the timescale of HS2^▸ (The next High Speed line(s)) there will be widespread use of battery HGVs.

In the same timescale, further renewable energy generation will come on stream, as well as mass storage technologies and V2G for said electricity. The UK^▸ (United Kingdom)'s first battery storage site should be running by 2024 with capacity to release 640Mwh to the grid. Not a huge amount, but it is only the first of many such plants. Development of other storage technologies continues apace.

Batteries are still heavy and the manufacturing process (eg. sourcing the minerals required) isn't exactly zero-carbon. eHGVs may be better than burning fossil fuels but not as energy efficeint as an electric railway (although I suppose we don't know the carbon cost of manufacturing the steel for the OHLE).

With eHGVs and electric buses and coaches taking to the roads in the next couple of decades the railways nationwide will have to adapt. £100bn+ (and rising) would go a long way toward greater OLE^▸ (Overhead Line Equipment, more often "OHLE") and battery electrification for the whole rail network. Rather that than spending it on one high speed line.

I think the UK has missed the boat on high speed rail. It is something we should have been persuing decades ago. Plus, we don't have the greater distances to travel by rail that other countries with established high speed rail services have. Line speed and rolling stock upgrading of the ECML^▸ (East Coast Main Line) and WCML^▸ (West Coast Main Line) should have continued.

So, the only reason I can think of for having HS2 now, is to say we have HS2. Vanity.

There is still a limit to the capacity that you can get out of a railway; no matter how much we upgrade the ECML and WCML eventually we will hit that ceiling and either have to build a new railway or continue transporting things by road. So capacity still remains a valid reason for building HS2, my question is whether that outways the equally valid reasons not to build HS2.

1. The most recent independent reviews, using recognised BCR^▸ (Benefit Cost Ratio) methodology, rank HS2 as a poor value project (IOG 2020)

As they did with Amazon when it was first launched.

I'm on the fence here:

• I think some areas of natural beauty (Exmoor may be one) should be protected from wind turbines, but am generally in favour of (aesthetically -designed) wind turbines
• I think the GWML^▸ (Great Western Main Line) electrification was terribly designed, and given the choice I may have campaigned for a very different design
• I think the main reason for decarbonisation comes from a moral duty to protect biodiversity, and as a result destroying large areas of important wildlife habitat to do so is counter-productive, so I am not in favour of a barrage but think other tidal projects (tidal stream turbines and possibly lagoons) should go ahead
• I can't see the point in 5G; it just seems to be a ruse to sell more 'stuff' - in this case phones - people already have phones so how do we make them buy more? I know, we'll launch a fancy new network so they need to buy a new phone to be able to use it, even though it just does much the same stuff as 4G (and 3G before that)

Full disclosure time - I have owned a home adjacent to Exmoor for 15 years (and will do for three more weeks). It, and other wild places, should be protected from wind farms. You would struggle to get permission to build something the size of a garden shed on Exmoor, but a 300' tall structure with blades that occasionally turn set in many many tonnes of concrete seems worth asking for. Long before I bought my place, my opinion had changed from thinking what wonderful things wind turbines were to seeing them as a threat to the countryside, far outweighing any perceived benefit. I'm not entirely convinced that sticking them in the sea is entirely environmentally sound, too, but they cause fewer complaints, so carry on. I struggle to imagine what an aesthetically designed wind turbine would look like, but as Spike Milligan said "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder - get it out with Optrex".

I'll skip the next two. The benefits of 5G are said to lie in the vastly greater ability to transmit information, giving rise to self-driving cars, smarter  use of energy, and a lot more things other than more cat videos on Facebook. It could be one of those changes that leaves us wondering how we ever managed before, but I am not that good at predicting the past, let alone the future.

There is a Gaia Wind 11kW Wind Turbine under 200 metres from our house. This is a fairly small wind turbine, and a Google image search for 'Gaia Wind' should give you some idea of how it looks. The Gaia wind turbine is available with a tube-type tower and a lattice type. In my opinion, the one near me (which has the tube-type tower) isn't far off my idea of an 'aesthetically designed' wind turbine - the lattice one is rather ugly in comparison. The only change I would make to the tube-tower version to make it fully 'aesthetically designed' would be to add a third blade, making it look more like the larger turbines found on wind farms (not that I agree with the design of some of those, the shape of the generator housing offends the eye with some of them).

There are areas where I think there are now too many wind turbines, and others which I think should be protected from them completely, but I think there is scope for a few more in other areas, provided they are all 'aesthetically designed' ones.

[Robin Summerhill]

Re the above, when I read Tony’s post about wind turbines I was reminded of my days as a kid in the early 60s taking a dim view about all the electricity pylons that were springing up in South Gloucestershire, presumably linked to the then new power stations at Berkeley and Oldbury.

Everybody has got used to them after all these years and I suspect that electricity supply coverage (let alone broadband rollout) would be far less today if the country hadn’t invested in them at the time.

Times change and sometimes one’s only choice is Hobson’s...

[TonyK]

There is a Gaia Wind 11kW Wind Turbine under 200 metres from our house. This is a fairly small wind turbine, and a Google image search for 'Gaia Wind' should give you some idea of how it looks. The Gaia wind turbine is available with a tube-type tower and a lattice type. In my opinion, the one near me (which has the tube-type tower) isn't far off my idea of an 'aesthetically designed' wind turbine - the lattice one is rather ugly in comparison. The only change I would make to the tube-tower version to make it fully 'aesthetically designed' would be to add a third blade, making it look more like the larger turbines found on wind farms (not that I agree with the design of some of those, the shape of the generator housing offends the eye with some of them).

There are areas where I think there are now too many wind turbines, and others which I think should be protected from them completely, but I think there is scope for a few more in other areas, provided they are all 'aesthetically designed' ones.

There are nine 2 MW models not too far from my other place, although happily far enough to be of little personal intrusion. Two villages closer to the site are not so fortunate, and have a much better view of the 60m tall towers surmounted by a nascelle the size of a bus and blades weighing several tonnes apiece. That is despite being formed of fibreglass coated balsa wood, the latter being a commodity that is causing lots of problems elsewhere in the world.  They seem a good idea to people living in cities, where there aren't any. On the occasions when they actually turn, it is at a price greater than the subsidy paid for the last tranche of North Sea wind power. There are no local jobs, and the profits go back to Germany. The planning process took seven years, with the decisions of the local authorities being overruled at a public inquiry. Build any new ones in the North Sea - Exmoor is more aesthetically designed without them.

Re the above, when I read Tony’s post about wind turbines I was reminded of my days as a kid in the early 60s taking a dim view about all the electricity pylons that were springing up in South Gloucestershire, presumably linked to the then new power stations at Berkeley and Oldbury.

Everybody has got used to them after all these years and I suspect that electricity supply coverage (let alone broadband rollout) would be far less today if the country hadn’t invested in them at the time.

Pylons are changing following a design competition a few years ago. I think the first new ones in our neck of the woods will be from Hinkley towards the Mendips, where I noticed last time I was allowed out that work seems to have started on the underground section. Quite a few of the existing lattice pylons will be superseded as the HV transmission lines are upgraded. It's odd to think that the "traditional" pylons were the result of a design competition too, all those years ago. Pylons differ from wind turbines in that, with a few notable exceptions, they are a lot shorter, and if they do move, it is generally only once, and in a downward direction.

[eightonedee]

The Gaia wind turbine is available with a tube-type tower and a lattice type.

WHAT! STILL USING LATTICE TOWERS!!

I went to a conference on the impact of renewable energy installations on wildlife, particularly birds as long ago as 2002. At this time the impact of wind power turbines was becoming clear as a result of about 20 years' experience, particularly in the south of Spain around Tarifa and in some sites in the US.

There were two take home messages of lessons learned so far. One was do not put lines of turbines along the tops of ridges and cliffs that attract dynamically soaring birds that take advantage of upward air currents as many fall victim to turbine blades. The second was that lattice towers are an absolute no-no, because sadly birds have a bad habit of perching on the lattice work then launching themselves into flight straight into the path of a fast turning turbine blade. The turbine blade always comes off best.

Having visited the Tarifa area a few times since I have noticed that none of the newer turbines are on lattices (indeed I don't think that I have seen any lattice towers on turbines any where else in Europe other than the older ones in that area - the last time I was there many of these were derelict). So it's concerning that someone is again building turbine towers to a design discredited about 20 years ago.

[Sixty3Closure]

As for 5G I think the challenges many people have had working from home with partners working as well and kids playing video games and watching 4K content do suggest that we need to invest in infrastructure. It would be nice if it was a bit more even though and I could get more than 1MB where I am in rural Wales. We've only just come in reach of 4G so 5G seems unlikely but I can see the argument for it.

One example in the media where I work is that we've been able to replace an outside broadcast truck with a people carrier and so on and eventually getting to the point where bonded SIMs in cameras are all that's needed for some situations. 5G only improves that.

I can see the benefits of investing in digital infrastructure. As you say, home working and schooling is much easier if you have high-quality broadband infrustructure, and indeed may not be practical without such infrustructure. Living in rural Wales myself, for years we were stuck with around 500kbps at best; then the national fibre rollout reached us and it has made a hell of a difference (they must have installed at least a mile of fibre optic cable for just two houses!) But I do almost all my computing at home/work; I don't see the need for similar connectivity on-the-go (although I must admit your outside broadcast scenario is one I didn't think of) and doesn't 4G offer a reasonable speed - would rolling that out more widely be more helpful than 5G?

Bit of a divergence but to answer the question. It would help in terms of geographical coverage. Covering a story near me in Carmarthenshire would probably still need a truck and VSAT. 5G should in theory be cheaper as only one SIM and also give you a faster up and down speed which makes editing in the cloud easier as well as live broadcasts. the bonded SIMs are just on the edge of being acceptable and not always reliable. In many areas contention is still an issue especially if you're covering a big event.

The other big challenge with 4G is that surprisingly corporate date packages are really expensive compared to domestic so in operational costs (i.e. data) the SIMs are very expensive but cheap capital costs.

[CyclingSid]

There was a mention on BBC^» (British Broadcasting Corporation - home page) this morning about the government thinking about putting up the price of meat and dairy products for environmental reasons, not a peep about roads and motoring (or coal mines).

[Surrey 455]

There was a mention on BBC^» (British Broadcasting Corporation - home page) this morning about the government thinking about putting up the price of meat and dairy products for environmental reasons, not a peep about roads and motoring (or coal mines).

The BBC must have read your post. They've now published this story. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-55923731

The leading climate scientist James Hansen has warned Boris Johnson that he risks “humiliation“ over plans for a new coal mine in Cumbria.

The UK^▸ (United Kingdom) government, which hosts a climate summit this year, has allowed the mine at Whitehaven to go ahead.

[TonyK]

The government answer in that article:

Ministers have defended the decision over the coal mine as a local planning matter, but have stressed that industries such as steel production require coking coal - which would have to be imported if it was not produced in the UK^▸ (United Kingdom).

is good enough for me. The good doctor has done much to heighten awareness of the downside of using fossil fuels, but one would think that his many years working for NASA would have shown that occasionally, needs must.

[broadgage]

Agree, iron and steel are vital raw materials, and can not be produced without coke derived from coal.
I see no merit in claiming to be green whilst importing our iron and steel from countries with doubtful reputations.

[IndustryInsider]

Such subtleties will no doubt (perhaps, deliberately) be lost on climate change activists.

[Bmblbzzz]

Pylons are changing following a design competition a few years ago. I think the first new ones in our neck of the woods will be from Hinkley towards the Mendips, where I noticed last time I was allowed out that work seems to have started on the underground section. Quite a few of the existing lattice pylons will be superseded as the HV transmission lines are upgraded. It's odd to think that the "traditional" pylons were the result of a design competition too, all those years ago. Pylons differ from wind turbines in that, with a few notable exceptions, they are a lot shorter, and if they do move, it is generally only once, and in a downward direction.

Apparently the Wentlooge Levels between Newport and Cardiff are a mecca for pylon spotters – yes, seriously, pylon spotting is as much a hobby as train spotting or bird spotting (perhaps easier to fill up your list, as pylons don't move – OTOH^▸ (On The Other Hand) that means the spotter can't wait for a migratory type to come to them, they have to go to it) – due to large number of different types used there. Why there should be a particular hotspot of pylon diversity in South Wales, I have no idea.

I expect turbine spotting is also a hobby for some.

[TonyK]

I expect turbine spotting is also a hobby for some.

There is at least one society dedicated to spotting birds killed by wind turbines. I would imagine pure turbine spotting could be a bigger attraction in Scotland and Wales than in England, given the greater availability.

[TaplowGreen]

Agree, iron and steel are vital raw materials, and can not be produced without coke derived from coal.
I see no merit in claiming to be green whilst importing our iron and steel from countries with doubtful reputations.

85% of the mine's output will be exported.

There's only a "hint" that some of it will be used domestically.

For someone who's happy to see the UK^▸ (United Kingdom) aviation industry go down the tubes on environmental grounds, you really do have some interesting priorities!

[TonyK]

85% of the mine's output will be exported.

There's only a "hint" that some of it will be used domestically.

It's nice that we can still export something, even if it isn't fish.  

But seriously - Germany's lignite is no good for making steel, so it's used to generate electricity. We could help them to keep their emissions down a bit by sending a few trainloads over.

I don't know much about France's steel industry, having concentrated on viniculture during my brief periods working there.

[broadgage]

Aviation is not in my view comparable to the production of iron and steel.
There are alternatives to flying, including ships and railways, or even staying in one place.
There is no realistic alternative to steel, nor is there any proven way to manufacture it without coal. Steel is needed to build ships, railways, and modern structures.
I would prefer to see steel manufactured in the UK^▸ (United Kingdom) with UK coal, rather than being imported. A UK source of coking coal will encourage the return of steel making to the UK.
The carbon emmisions are regretable, but can not be avoided if we are to continue use of steel. I see no merit in exporting the carbon emmisions to china.

I am happy to not fly, and I try to minimise purchases of goods transported by air.
I can not avoid use of iron or steel products and structures.