I'm travelling from Helsinki to Northampton without flying and it's treble the price. Why do rail companies pay duty on fuel when airlines don’t?

So much of our transport  is rigged against the climate. If we think we can reduce emissions by relying on individual people to absorb these kinds of economic distortions we’re allllll gonna die.

Hi, I’m Rosie, I’m one half of FOSSILHEADS and I hate flying and never want to do it again. 

Ways I can ensure this:

i) Not take another long distance holiday: Easy 

ii) Not have a life where my wife is from Finland and neither of us hate our families enough to never want to see them again: Less easy.

Quick low carbon solution: more hateful families. 

Slower, less low carbon solution: pay through the nose to take the train over a thousand miles and hope that acting on my flight shame results in being awarded some kind of special smugness trophy made of upcycled oats.

Rightwingers lurrve to derail (LOL!) conversations about the climate by swooping in on the personal behaviours of the person doing the talking. Maybe they fly, maybe they have children, maybe they have a car, maybe they are drinking an almond latte from a single use polystyrene cup sprinkled with the ashes of burnt rainforest or MAYBE they are breathing, therefore emitting CO2 AS THEY LITERALLY SPEAK, the dirty, hypocritical swine. Any environmental point that person is trying to make is instantly null and void, conversation over. 

It’s a tedious, lazy strategy but holy bags-for-life batman, it’s effective. Now that those railing (LOL!) against the kind of profound changes needed to limit the impact of man-made climate change have realised that denial theories only serve to make them look like first prize clowns, this ol’ faithful finger pointing gotcha has become their main go-to. (See also “bUT ChInA”). 

Why is it so effective? I think it might be because so many people already feel alienated by the eco “solutions” presented to us over the years. They always seem to involve spending a lot of money or having a lot of free time, or both. “Green” has just become another flavour of consumerism and the people who can’t afford these kinds of “solutions” are likely to still have lower carbon footprints than those who can. 

Consumers are stuck feeling like we hold the key to fixing the climate crisis if only we cared enough when the reality is that when it comes to transport, and indeed throughout our entire economy, the odds are stacked against us and also the climate.  And I don’t mean this in a “oh what’s the point, it’s hopeless” kind of way, I mean in a “we simply need to smash global corporate power and invest in our public transport” kind of way.

Whilst I don’t think we should ever stop considering the environmental impact of our personal actions, I do find that Martin Lukacs’ memorable 2017 article “Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals” gives a good perspective on how putting the responsibility to fix climate change solely at the doorstep of the consumer has been a devastatingly successful distraction from us identifying the wide scale systemic economic changes that need to be made towards sustainability.

The article Why is flying So Much Cheaper than the Train by Climate Action 10:10 is a very measured summary of some of the logistical reasons that rail travel is not as cheap as I Damn Well Think It Damn Well Ought to be, including that it’s a highly staffed mode of transport, long journey times, track maintenance, oh and the trains also cost money apparently etc etc. However, it also points to factors such as that airlines pay no fuel duty and that their customers pay no VAT on tickets (a more detailed source on this here)- why are these kinds of exemptions still weighted in flying’s favour at this point? Did nobody get the memo? 

It also outlines the conflicting interests of private rail companies in the UK contribute to rail fares being significantly higher than most of Europe - something that will be highlighted when I break down the fascinating price of each part of my interesting journey in a very compelling fashion en route DON’T STOP READING I’M VERY COOL AND INTERESTING I PROMISE

If you look at a timeline of carbon emissions since 1990 you will see that in the UK (and most of Europe), emissions are dropping every year from there. This is not, and I can’t stress this enough, because our energy saving lightbulb game has been JUST THAT EPIC but because we closed the majority of our factories and started manufacturing the majority of our goods overseas in pursuit of cheap labour. 

Slimy climate-responsibility denying politicians will claim this as evidence of our environmental virtue and of course say “BuT cHiNA” ignoring the fact that it’s not really that our emissions reduced, they just moved. To China mainly. Our consumer behaviour has in fact ballooned out of control but many of the environmental impacts are invisible to us now we've outsourced our pollution, which also includes the enormous levels of extra carbon produced from the thousands of container ships churning their way across the globe to bring our crap back to us. 

Aanyhooo the reason I mention this is that this reduction in factories etc now means that transport is our highest source of emissions in the UK.  

Car manufacturers may act like they are essentially flower children for bringing out an electric car (more high end consumer “solutions”), but they are just capitalising on the fantasy that we can carry on Just Like Before but with a few tweaks here and there. We can’t. Even if everyone could afford them, it's been suggested there is not enough cobalt left IN THE WORLD to replace even HALF of the UK’s cars with electric vehicles. The future is in public transport - so why have’t we invested in it better?

As someone who has never owned a car (OK I had one for about a week but I don’t want to talk about it) it’s been a constant, decades long source of utter frustration how little effort has been made by rail and bus companies to encourage people out of their cars. Successive governments have allowed privatised services to centre profit above all else, almost as if lowering emissions has never been a consideration. This quote from Friends of the Earth’s policies on transforming public transport really succinctly summarises the near unfathomable system British bus users are expected to navigate at the hands of multiple private companies:

"The UK is unique in Europe in having a deregulated system for its buses, and this deficit of governance lies at the core of the poor performance of our local public transport networks. In a deregulated system, decisions about where and when to run services are made by individual operators, based primarily on criteria related to profitability rather than on environmental, social or public interest criteria. There’s no ‘guiding mind’ to oversee the planning, management and delivery of public transport services across a whole town or city and its surrounding suburbs and villages. This makes it far less likely that a comprehensive network of services will be offered, and makes it extremely complex (and in practice, impossible) to coordinate timetables and services across all public transport modes."    

(Read the whole document if you get the chance, it’s excellent.)

And the trains. OH GOD DON’T GET ME STARTED ON THE TRAINS. We all know the prices are insane but MY GOD, my friend got a new job in London so looked into getting a season ticket from Northampton which is sixty miles away… and pals…an annual season ticket from Northampton to London… costs nearly SIX THOUSAND POUNDS. Look it up I am not even kidding you. And OH GOD don’t get me started on GREAT WESTERN RAILWAY. They’ve BANNED surfboards from their trains in Cornwall. Fucking CORNWALL!! Like they’re actually actively TRYING to get people to drive ffs. And OH GOD don’t get me started on… OK I really have to go and pack for our trip brb

HI again pals, I am just in the process of writing up my second part of this blog - in the mean time, please check out my FASCINATING THREAD OF TRAIN INTERIORS documenting our travels, also available on fb HERE.