The public doesn't hate Net Zero as much as RW politicians insist they do

"Saying 'literally make them cheaper' is a nice fantasy, but it breaks down completely the second it hits reality for a few reasons:

The Taxpayer Tax: If a train journey costs £150 to run but the government mandates it must be sold for £30, the other £120 doesn’t magically vanish. Taxpayers who don't travel would have to pick up the multi-billion-pound tab to subsidise other people’s holidays to Paris.

The International Hurdle: Eurostar isn't a domestic British train—it is a private company owned by the French and Belgian state railways. The UK government cannot legally pass a law forcing foreign companies to lose millions by accepting a British £200 discount card.

The Tunnel Toll: Every train must pay a massive toll (thousands of pounds per trip) just to use the Channel Tunnel. A cheap flat-rate ticket wouldn't even cover the cost of entering the tunnel, let alone the track maintenance or electricity.

The Post-Brexit Bottleneck: You can make tickets cost 50p, but price caps don't create physical seats. St Pancras and Gare du Nord are already turning passengers away and running trains with empty seats because border control physically cannot process passport checks fast enough.

It makes sense to use our resources sensibly and not waste them , but a lot of Net Zero is plain and simple performative nonsense - I work in an industry where every client has to produce a climate report each year, costing an absolute fortune to produce and all which largely say the same thing - it is very clearly a tick box exercise which is making someone very rich.

Noise , boo hoo it's an airport. Will help so much with local jobs.

You must really lack an understanding of economics

It will take ages. 4.5 hours to London. And then 2 hours to Paris. Whereas a direct Edinburgh to Paris flight can take 1 hour 50 minutes. So much faster. And you didn't address all the other things I said

And that’s where policy comes in.

Literally make them cheaper.

1 - Make them fixed price - no airline style yield pricing - 1 km costs £X always.

2 - Make them cheap and offer half fare cards for anyone who wants to buy one for £200 a year.

Couldn’t be easier. Make it happen.

Yeah they didn't. But Kemi has new ideas

It is but it's expensive. I've done it a lot, but I was visiting from abroad with an interrail ticket and those are great because they make almost all train travel in the UK free. You don't need to book weeks in advance to get the cheapest journey, you just decide what day you are using it on and you can do that on the day itself. The problem is this is only available to people visiting the UK from Europe, you can't use the interrail pass to get around your own country except to leave or enter it.
If they made those sort of journeys more affordable and flexible it would be so much better than flying by plane!

Edinburgh to Paris is easy by train - Intercity to King’s Cross, walk next door to St Pancras then Eurostar to Paris.

If you are really poor (relying on food bank poor) you probably can’t afford flights anyway.

There are other problems with expanding Heathrow such as noise and air pollution.

It's a pity they didn't put that brilliant plan into action during the 14 years they were in government really.

You make it happen.

Edit: we will also have to redig all the tunnels in the Cotswolds. God help us.
And double decker trains aren't even high speed anyway and can't be high speed. They don't add that much extra capacity though they are very cool. You can add much more capacity for every point spent by building more rail lines. They can be suitable for double decker trains if you really want it to be.

London and Manchester are about 160 miles apart. Currently trains between the two cities take about 2 hours. You could save some time if you didn't slow down or stop at any of the stations so went at max speed all the way. And of course if there aren't delays getting stuck behind slower trains etc. In theory** you could do it in less than an hour and a half using existing UK mainline maximum safe train speeds.

If we built a super fast 200 mile an hour train line between Manchester and London and went from 0to200 in a minute, kept that speed and then decelerated at the same pace you could cut the journey time down to less than 50 minutes. Amazing! But also you just turned all the passengers to mush. If you allow a standard acceleration/deceleration rate then by the time you have reached 200mph you only sustain it for about 20 minutes before decelerating. So the actual journey time is still likely to be an hour minimum. You save maximum 25 minutes time but for an increased cost of tens of billions or more.

When some people talk high speed they mean 125mph, which is a much better target to aim for. A lot of South West train lines have that already. In some places this is achieved by tilting trains that are able to travel faster safely on bending track. Likewise there are plans to build 125mph an hour track over the pennines. But when people talk about high speed rail in terms of 200 mph as in Japan, it just isn't worth it. You get the law of diminishing returns (the time saving goes down because of the acceleration restrictions) and the requirements to have completely straight track cost exponentially more. Increasing rail capacity by creating more rail lines means faster trains don't get held up by local trains, means freight gets its own rail line etc. It's just more suited to the UKs needs. And a 125 mph hour direct train from London to Edinburgh would still be faster than flying when you allow check in etc. it just has to be affordable and reliable to be competitive.

**Theory being a long way from reality.

We need to cut energy costs. The Tories have a cheap power plan which will make energy cheaper.

Good for us - fastest in G7 is impressive.

We do our part, the others do their part. If we’re faster, then that’s incredible for us - those who rework their energy systems fastest for the post oil-age will be the winners of the 22nd century.

The laggards will be the ones who face economic ruin when fossil fuels are no longer competitive.

Make it happen means stop saying “yeah but” and literally make it happen.

If we can create tunnels for Cotswold residents to not have to see a railway, we can do the same so that we can run double decker trains. Like an actual proper country should.

Make. It. Happen.

Look at china and India and see how much their emissions have risen. We've cut emissions a lot since 2010. Fastest in the G7.

For double decker trains, it's not a matter of just buying double decker trains. The infrastructure (in this case bridges) isn't set up for it so you would need to close down vast swathes of the UK rail network to rebuild the bridges and make this possible. I put it to you that banning all short distance flights such that the only way for people to travel is via those rail networks would not make this work more likely to happen. It would make it harder. Likewise longer trains need longer railway platforms. Not impossible to do, but needs building work and necessitates some disruption.
"Make it happen". How do you make things happen? You build shit. The UKs train network is already at full capacity in a lot of areas. It's not really open to debate that we need more rail capacity. Pretty much everyone agrees with that. But the market isn't some magical force that just delivers things. It still takes time and government effort and pressure.

Anyone who has seen a graph comparing our output with China knows Net Zero is just another shakedown operation on gullible western do-gooding populations. Taxes here, subsidies there, grifting politicians with board seats on "sustainable" energy companies everywhere.

Our country slides towards an abyss of debt, worklessness, low productivity and endless immigration, while politicians like Miliband burnish their halos with the Net Zero scam.

It's sickening and goes along with the bus fare bullshit as a sign of how fatuous our modern politics is.

So no OP right wing politicians aren't wrong when they say how hated it is.

Right, but is Switzerland banning flights to make the tunnels be built faster? Is anyone? Or, as you mention freight, is Switzerland (or any of the countries affected) banning all road based freight in and out of the EU to incentivise the tunnels to be built? Or are they building the tunnels first?

I actually want the rail industry AND the aviation industry to thrive.

Why do you seem to think the UK is doing this in isolation ?

We flew back from Switzerland recently. Ryanair as well. All those carbon emissions for a 1.5 hour flight. You must hate it.

The basis tunnels don’t only help Switzerland, they provide much smoother north-south freight options in order to take cargo off the roads for all countries requiring alpine transit.

The point with emissions is that we need to cut them yesterday, with urgency. And it needs the same levels of effort and investment we humans are all too willing to invest in war and weaponry to kill each other.

Ending UK domestic aviation to favour rail will not harm the economy because the railways already exist. It would help if the trains which use them were more frequent, and higher capacity first, and faster second. Can we have double-deck trains ? Make it happen. Can we have longer trains ? Make it happen. Only then do we need faster trains.

So we can do it right now, ban the utter lunacy of domestic aviation and then watch the market make rail more efficient, more competitively priced, and more attractive than it is now.

If the UK reaches net zero then what changes to the global climate? Absolutely nothing. The UK's impact on the global emissions is miniscule and cannot change global emissions at all. We've decarbonised a lot since 2010. But India's emissions are rapidly growing and so are China's..... So what impact have we had?

@Persephonia1966 You were talking about getting rid of short haul.
To do that you do need HS from London to Manchester, Edinburgh etc. No one is flying London Birmingham anyway.