For a climate activist that must sound like an oxymoron, if not outright blasphemy. Didn’t Europeans fuel massive industrialization by burning coal and thereby commit the original sin of climate change?
Let us go back 200 years, though. Besides the horse-drawn cart, there was hardly anything around of what we today consider essential for the functioning of a modern society: no internal combustion engine, no electricity, no high-speed trains, no GPS satellites and not much understanding of nature and its inherent forces and capabilities.
Following Watt’s invention of the industrial steam engine (in the preceding 18th century) an exponential growth of knowledge, production and modernization started in Europe, and spread and sped across the world. At uneven pace, with undesired side effects, but all in all, humanity has benefited tremendously.
Take the railways, the driver and even icon of progress and modernization. Between 1830 and 1900 most of Europe and the USA built the basis of today’s railroad networks and a rail-based system of transportation of people and goods. These railways served the immense demands of the industrial revolution and mass production.
Most of the network and the operators were financed privately and agreements were found to standardise gauge, couplings and, to an extent signalling. The innovative technical and engineering solutions were a result of constant competition for profits, efficiency, and safety. In Europe, these networks were built without a European Union; Germany and Italy were still fragmented into a plethora political entities of various sizes and forms of government. The USA built their network in a territory with immense geophysical challenges, inclement climate and a hostile (for quite good reasons) native population. And yet the railroads formed the infrastructure backbone for both Europe and the USA. It brought together people, helped build nations in the USA, Germany, and Italy, and contributed to unification across continents.
Governments had little to do with the inventions and innovations then: it was individual quest, private initiative and capitalist finance that brought us here. Governments, for the better part, had provided a conducive environment, for the worst part they meddled with institutions, distorted markets, and delayed progress.
Over the past three months I travelled about 6,000 km by railroad through ten different central, northern, and south-eastern European countries. I have seen both very advanced and rather backwards networks, services and equipment as well as administration of railroad systems in various shapes. Whether it is finding the right trains, securing berths on sleeper cars, buying tickets, scheduling connections, reserving seats on trains crossing borders, or booking three months in advance was a herculean task. While one might be tempted to expect that in the Balkans but even traveling between Austria, Germany and Sweden was complicated – organising these travels were – to put it mildly -anachronistic.
How is it possible that you can travel by car from Sofia to Vienna in ten hours, while it takes the train somewhere between 16 and 20 hours? By comparison the train from Munich to Berlin takes just under four hours, whereas by car you must calculate at least six hours.
How is it possible that freight on trains in Germany moves at around 20 km/hour whereas in the supposedly railroad-inimical USA with a generally poor track it reaches 40 km/hour?
How can a community of nations that has agreed on Schengen, a common currency, a common agricultural policy, a continental road network, and an Erasmus learning exchange programme for young adults fail to develop a common rail policy that overcomes the parochial and sclerotic national railway administrations and brings in private sector efficiency to develop an state-of-the-art pan-European railway network? A network that allows you to travel around 800 km from Bratislava to Bucharest in the same time as from Flensburg to Munich within Germany. Today the time difference is 10 hours.
Let us learn the lessons from the 19th century and make railways the unifying, integrating, job-creating icon of a Europe truly ready for climate change– and we will not even have to burn coal for that. Just cheap money from the ECB – efficiently of course.