Green perspectives on Stockwood and Bristol. Mostly.

Tuesday 24 February 2009

Holland goes to Belgium


Nice to see that Helen Holland managed to pop over to Brussels to see the failure of Bristol's bid for 'European Green Capital' at first hand.

Still, she knows we were up there with the best, fully committed to "tackling the causes of climate change"

Addendum: The crossed contrails may give the false impression that the Brussels trip was made by air. It wasn't.

So far as I know the council has no view as to the merits or otherwise of air travel as a cause of climate change - though it does still seem keen to see the airport expand.

4 comments:

SteveL said...

if you've ever looked at the logistics of train travel to abroad, you'd fly too. If HH did want to make our city greener, she'd be campaigning for us to have electric trains that would use crossrail to get to the eurotrain station.

Pete Goodwin said...

.... or maybe she'd just settle for a local bus that goes to a real interchange at Temple Meads (not a 'docking station' 500m away from the London platforms).

I take the point about flying, though. In September I went to Belfast. Cheapest surface route (including overnight) was train to London, sleeper to Glasgow, train to Troon, bustitution to Cairnryan, ferry to Larne, train to Belfast. Great journey, but I suspect the carbon footprint wasn't much smaller!

Chris Hutt said...

Pete, did you check the option of going by train to Fishguard, ferry to Dublin and then train to Belfast? Surely a lot less miles and maybe a lot less money than going via London and Glasgow.

Pete Goodwin said...

I tried every option Chris - Fishguard, Holyhead, Liverpool, Heysham and Larne - within the constraints on when I wanted to arrive in Belfast, railcards, the lot. The Caledonian Sleeper won because it was cheap and saved B&B!