This feature makes its first appearance in 2022. Mainly because there’s so few anti HS2 people left out there and the ones that are are nearly all crazy! However, this one is such a classic self-own I couldn’t resist.

Meet Iolo Williams, a minor celebrity in the Chris Packham mould. Like Packham he never lets facts get in the way of his occasional rants about HS2. This time with hilarious consequences! Here’s his tweet from yesterday when Williams channelled his inner Jeremy Corbyn to have himself photographed sitting in the vestibule of a train.

Ignoring the fact he managed to link in a spoof Avanti West Coast Twitter account, not the real one (attention to detail, much?) there’s several problems with his tweet which is just a cut and past job of anti HS2 soundbites. Let’s start with the fact that the new HS2 railway IS “investment in the current network” as it will be part of it, not separate to it. And most delicious irony? HS2 will relieve the very line that Williams is travelling on and complaining about having to sit on the floor! Without HS2 Williams would be doomed to sit on floors forever (as he seems incapable of reserving a seat) because there’s no extra capacity to be squeezed out of the West Coast Main Line. Of course, Williams also seems ignorant of the fact we spent £9bn upgrading that line just 15 years ago, which caused massive disruption for years that led to the service hemorrhaging passengers as it was closed nearly every weekend to allow the upgrades to happen. Those people transferred to far more polluting road transport.

This isn’t the first example of cognitive dissonance and complete absence of knowledge or fact we’ve seen from Williams. I’ve blogged about him before this time last year here when I had to look him up because I’d never heard of him. That’s when I found out he shares other traits with Chris Packham. Both of them fly people around the world on expensive wildlife trips to exotic locations and charge people for their company.

So, we have a ‘conservationist’ who objects to us building low-carbon mass transport that is vital to cutting our biggest source of Co2 emissions (transport) but who’s happy to generate God knows how many tonnes of Co2 flying people around the world. Here’s a list of destinations advertised on his website. Hypocritical, much? Even his Spanish trips advertise flights although it’s perfectly possible to get there by very low carbon transport (rail).

This is why you should ignore the pronouncements of ‘conservationists’ when it come to the environment. They’re often part of the problem, not part of the solution. Here’s the science these people ignore. What Williams is opposing is on the bottom of this chart. What he’s based a business around is the opposite…

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