Originally Posted by hfly

Yet with all that high speed track and trains there are still 55+ flights in each direction between Beijing and Shanghai in any given day. There are 50+ high speed train pairs each day and another dozen or so regular trains. 15 years ago it was about 20 flights, there were no high speed trains and the regular train service was about the same as now, furthermore many of the flights are on wide body aircraft. Want to look at HKG-Shanghai? Also had high speed trains. 19 years ago you had about 10 flights a day, now is about 40. You want to talk post capita? HKG, which has one tenth the population of the UK (and which is in actual fact a part of china, despite the two systems) had half as many passengers as the UK (well maybe it will actually have less this year....) so if you add that in, the Chinese in fact already fly about 5 times as much as the UK. And this is a nicely important point, because if all of china are to reach anything near Hong Kong levels, then we would be talking Chinese numbers 30 or 40 times the UK and you would be happy because you could Drone on about some sort of Gini coefficient Gdp parity. 15 years ago, there were now many flights between EDI and all London airports? Slightly more today due to LCC's to remote London airports. Furthermore you may have noticed that since this thread started the Chinese just built a new airport in Beijing that is our will soon be larger than LHR by almost every measurement, for runways, no debate and that is in addition to the existing airport.

To say the Chinese are investing in green technologies does not mean what you think it means. Chinese cities especially in the winter are like Armageddon, often you cannot see more than 10 meters due to pollution, and every pollution index has been off the chart for years. So they are moving nicely into green technologies because they have to. The difference is that other than obliging people to use new technologies (I remember fondly how over a three month period they made petrol powered scooters illegal and overnight seemingly everyone bought battery powered ones) they would never dream of instituting anything that would hinder economic growth more penalize people from living "better" lives, in fact it is because their standards have constantly been raising that allows the party to survive.

While the UK stupidly dithers about a third Runway for 20+ years, no one else anywhere really bad such qualms. Even the Germans who are 20 times more ecologically "woke" than the Brits build runways with barely a murmur, same for the French and almost anyone else.

So while you cheer on your own luddites with made up names who write dubious manifestos that are promoted and embraced by the Guardian, that would "punish" your perceived "haves" and even if implemented would have absolutely little or no effect on improving the environment, every one else will eat your lunch.