Looking up

I’m writing this on January 1st.

The back door is open, blowing away the smoky air from last night’s fireworks along with the remnants of a slight hangover. In fact, it’s a beautiful Spring morning…

Now I’m not going to reminisce about the days when Winter meant rain, sleet and snow but it’s not right is it?

I don’t know if you have had chance to see the film, Don’t Look Up. It got panned by the critics, but I suspect that’s because it’s a bit blunt as allegories go, telling the story of how a couple of scientists try to persuade those in power that they have six months to act before a fatal comet hits the Earth. It is, however, a funny and depressing look at how our leaders and media fail to grasp the magnitude of the situation, and there’s a pretty blunt sideswipe at a character whose name might be Elon with a touch of Zuckerberg thrown in too!

After COP 26, I optimistically hoped we had turned a proverbial corner, but it turns out that worrying about the climate was something we did back in the Autumn but we’re on to something new now. Rob Parsons, editor of Northern Agenda, asked ten leaders what their hopes were for 2022. Amongst all the talk of levelling up and pandemic recovery, climate was mentioned only once in passing by one MP and once by Roger Marsh in order to explain why we needed more growth.

Meanwhile, I’ve just had a long email from West Yorkshire’s Mayor explaining what Mayoral plans are for decarbonising transport, ending with a paragraph on why it is important to allow the airport to expand so that we don’t ‘reduce our competitiveness compared to other regions’. I realise the grown-up thing to do is to compose a calm, well-argued email on the false narrative about displacement of air travel and the technical challenges of decarbonising aviation, but like Jennifer Lawrence’s character in Don’t Look Up, I just want to shout ‘BUT WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!’

And breathe…

Anyway, amongst the personal resolutions about getting out and about more, away from my tediously covid-secure bunker, I think we need to find a new way to talk about climate change. Not in terms of doomsday but in terms of opportunity. Opportunity for different kinds of jobs in low carbon industries but also opportunities to live differently.

I can’t believe anyone really enjoys long commutes, traffic jams or cramming a two-week holiday in the sun into the middle of fifty weeks of drudgery. And we continue to worry about paying fuel bills because no UK government has yet tackled the real issue of energy self-reliance head on, when all along we have had wind and sunshine freely available!

So new beginnings but new ways of doing things. I don’t want to go back to business as usual. We can do better than that.

A day in the life of unintegrated travel

On a trip out with my son last Friday, we followed one of my rules for public transport and left with ‘a bus to spare’. If this bus didn’t show up, we’d still have time to get where we were going on the next. It’s tough in the bus industry at the moment as driver shortages make running a full timetable difficult. I’ll leave you to make up your own mind why many drivers, often from eastern Europe, are no longer driving buses in the UK…

It was a two-bus journey with the first leg going well and an eight-minute gap for our connection.  However, one of the other rules for public transport (at least in West Yorkshire) is ‘be very suspicious if no real time tracking is showing’. Real time information was a real game changer when it was introduced maybe fifteen years ago. Nowadays it is expected, and people purse their lips disapprovingly if the bus marked as ‘due’ spends an extra two or three minutes getting through the lights.

Back at the stop, the bus scheduled for 2.18pm was nowhere in sight and the 2.33pm also showing a scheduled (untracked) time. No worries, we’re transport geeks!

Clicking on the Local Authority website gave us a journey alternative of a train and a connecting bus and clicking though to the rail website gave us… ‘error 500!’ I didn’t know what that was but apparently, it’s google-speak for ‘it’s something to do with the server but I’m not sure what’.

Anyway geek move two was to check out local rail website directly which gave us a list of 14 possible pdf’s. Having limited time and download capacity, we set off walking towards the rail station whilst checking Trainline. Checking scheduled time, buying tickets and then going on ‘realtimetrains’ (for supergeeks) to check actual running whilst not crashing into fellow pedestrians kept my peripheral vision busy but we made it.

Tragedy!

The train was running two minutes late. Now strictly speaking that’s not really late if you’re talking franchise obligations. But if you’re a customer with a three-minute gap to a connection, it’s stressful. We asked the conductor where the bus stopped and he shrugged his shoulders, so again back to the internet where three different sites failed to show a diagram of onward journeys, even though I know it’s mandatory to have a poster of this at every station.

As the train pulled into our station, we could see the bus stop and thankfully still two minutes for the tracked bus.

‘Phew’ we gasped to the bus driver, ’is this bus planned to pick up from the train?’

‘Not really, he said, ‘we’re told not to wait for the train.’ Sigh.

The journey home was more straightforward information and timewise, but what about tickets?

Had all gone to plan, we could have made the whole journey on a single operator day ticket. As it was, we bought an extra train ticket each, an extra bus ticket, and we were about to let our homeward bus in Leeds go because it was run by a different operator until my son remembered that journeys were £1 after 7pm so we paid for that too. £4.70 each versus our actual £10.40 each*.

So ironically this tells me what integration should mean.

Simple, easy to find, consistent information without having to switch to multiple sites (and surely pdf downloads are now in the digital fossil record?).

Clear multi-operator ticket range.

And don’t assume customers can predict exactly the ticket product they are going to need at the beginning of the day particularly if plans change because of service failures. Charge them at the end what they should have paid for what was delivered to them.

It’s difficult for me to be sanguine about this having spent many years at Transport for the North trying to do exactly that, but with the national bus strategy – Bus Back Better – and the advent of Great British Railways, there is a challenge and an opportunity for all of us across the industry.

If it’s this hard for someone who knows every transport website and ticketing scheme inside out, how do we persuade normal people?!

* I checked later what the post-pay cost would have been. The answer I think is £13.70 for a family ticket as long as you can be ‘beamed up’ to a bus or rail station to buy one.

Jet Zero – not what it says on the tin

In my time, I’ve had something to do with maybe a couple of dozen business cases, most of which eventually ended up in front of assurance teams at the Department for Transport. It’s the job of these people to look at your Business Case from the standpoint of each of the standard five sections – strategic, economic, commercial, financial, management – all with endless appendices to add notes, tables, figures, references.

You get quizzed on your assumptions, what data did you use? What is your worst-case scenario if costs spiral or stakeholders just say no? And one of the first things you do is set out the options you’ve considered. What if you did nothing and the business case wasn’t approved? What would the impact be? What different ways have you thought of achieving your objectives? What are the pros and cons of each?

It was with this thought that I opened the recent Jet Zero consultation documents, which set out four possible scenarios for the UK’s aviation industry, with the ambition to ‘set out our plans … through a strategy to deliver net zero aviation by 2050, or Jet Zero’.

It came as a bit of a surprise to me, therefore, that none of the options they describe actually do that.

The scenarios consider five influencing factors:

(1) System efficiency (e.g. better designed, lighter aircraft); (2) SAFs (sustainable aviation fuels); (3) Zero emission flights (battery-powered or hydrogen-fuelled); (4) Markets and removals – e.g. use of carbon budgeting to influence markets; and removals – literally measures to extract carbon from the atmosphere; and (5) Influencing consumers.

According to the modelling, the business-as-usual option results in 36 extra metric tonnes of CO2 by 2050 that would need offsetting somehow or somewhere else to hit net zero.

From there, there are three other scenarios with increasing levels of hopefulness and finger-crossing about what could be achieved if the above factors – especially the techy ones – can only be made to work out. And even then, they still leave us with between 9 and 21 metric tonnes of CO2 thirty years from now.

For the avoidance of doubt, definitely not zero.

I’ve been trying to work out why it might be that this situation is just so scary that we can’t even write down what would be needed to hit net zero.

In part the aviation industry has obviously been hit hard by the pandemic, so it’s definitely not a winning argument to shrug your political shoulders at this unexpected carbon windfall.

However, I have another thought.

All of the Jet Zero scenarios assume that passenger growth will carry on increasing, resulting in an extra 60% more flights by 2050, so – the argument goes – what can the industry do except respond to this demand by increasing supply? This is the claim currently being used by seven of our regional airports to justify their expansion plans.

Now wasn’t this the same argument that was for decades (and still is in many places) used to justify motorways and adding extra lanes to the strategic road network, only to find that it filled up again a few years later?

Enter stage left ‘demand management’! Initially driven by congestion, air quality concerns and the desire to make best use of public transport, demand management in ‘surface’ transport is well developed.

It’s a harder argument, however, as congestion in the air is only obvious to a handful of air traffic controllers and a few pilots above Heathrow.

The limits are those we will need to impose on ourselves to address emissions, and this brings with it the need for fairness in how this is applied. According to the New Economics Foundation, ‘in the UK, 15% of people take 70% of all flights, while nearly 50% of the population do not fly at all in a given year. This is a hugely unequal division of the carbon budget for aviation (and a large share of the UK’s total carbon budget).’

If the aim is to reduce emissions, this seems to clearly indicate a changing taxation regime to influence frequent flyers to be less frequent. And given that much of the business world has survived on a diet of Teams and Zoom calls for 18 months, this is clearly possible even if not always desirable.

The other side of demand management is to provide alternatives. It cannot continue to be cheaper to fly from Manchester to London than to catch the train. Someone needs to consider – for instance – why air fuel is tax exempt but electricity for trains isn’t. Can’t remember reading anything to that effect in the Williams-Shapps Plan.

I’ve had my say as part of the consultation and you’ll find it here if you also want to feed back. Responses are due in by 8th September 2021. Feel free to comment below.

How can we change?

After Monday’s IPCC report, it seems as good a time as any to begin the blog on my new website.

The best-case scenario in the report – global net zero by 2050 or so – still brings with it more extreme weather events, floods, heatwaves and droughts, with some areas being much worse hit than others. And the warming we have had already will have effects that cannot simply be turned back. To give one of the many key quotes: ‘sea level is committed to rise for centuries to millennia due to continuing deep ocean warming and ice sheet melt and will remain elevated for thousands of years.’ Today I read that the former president of the Maldives predicts extinction for the island country and many others like it.

Thanks to reading a Linked In post from a couple of people I don’t know from the other side of the world, I was reminded of this quote from Lord of the Rings (apologies to any Tolkien-phobes out there):

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.

“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Tolkien wrote most of Lord of the Rings during the second world war so it’s fairly easy to see where he was coming from. Less so when the enemy is ourselves and we’re not entirely sure how to fight.

For us – in Western Europe at least – we have seen the longest period of peace, wealth and stability in our history, and it’s an uncomfortable thought but our fight is with that same stability and familiarity: the comfort of turning up the heating in winter, driving the car to the shops when you need to, eating steak and chips on a Friday and heading to the sun for holidays. That’s not to say that these things should be forbidden, but that they come at a (carbon) cost.

I’ve read a lot the last couple of days about ‘teching’ our way out of it but to me, this is only putting off the inevitable. We need to change how we live.

Electric cars have been around for quite a while. They were used to deliver milk back in the 1950s when horses went out of fashion, and they’ve got much better recently. But zero emission planes? Not even off the starting blocks. Industrial scale production of heat pumps and hydrogen-based boilers seems a way off. The vegan offer in supermarkets has improved but there’s still as many cows in the fields, and I’m fairly sure that’s still methane they’re emitting.

Change doesn’t have to mean poverty and denial though. There are plenty of people who are doing less well out of the current system, so we need to rebuild in a way that brings prosperity and equity as well as sustainability. Easy to say, isn’t it? But where does the change come from?

I can understand why us as individuals think ‘what difference can I make by walking to the shops once a week or eating veggie now and again?’ It’s tempting to put it all at the feet of big business or to ask what governments are doing, but this risks becoming deflection rather than action.

So I’ve had a go at showing how the tripartite of citizens, business and government might influence each other.

Now I realise this looks ridiculously naïve. Where on the diagram are the lobbyists for the gas and oil companies you may ask? What do you do when the chief emitter is the state-run Chinese coal corporation? And I do realise that businesses don’t just respond but are often the source of innovation and new solutions.

But it has helped me, at least, to begin a plan of influence and action. Think about what I buy – what do I know about the companies supplying me? When did I last let my MP know what I was thinking? Who can I join to collectivise this action?

I’ll let you know how I use the time that is given to me. Let me know what you’re planning too.