What have the Romans ever done for us?
Jonathan Mosse’s monthly look at freight developments on the inland waterways.
IN THE Monty Python Life of Brian sketch the list of Roman achievements soon swells to include a multitude of significant social benefits, with aqueducts the first to be mentioned! I suspect that these were of the drinking water variety but let’s, for our purposes, assume they carried commercial craft.
In the contemporary context of climate change and the move towards net zero, we could substitute COP28 for the Romans, thereby providing an opportunity to examine how, if at all, the recent deliberations in the oil-rich state of the United Arab Emirates might impact on commercial carrying on the UK inland waterways.
After all, when its elder sibling held centre stage in 2021 beside a significant Scottish tidal river, straddled by a large city – totally bare of commercial cargo-carrying – nothing whatsoever changed.
The River Clyde still flows, unfettered by barge traffic, through the centre of Glasgow to the open sea beyond Greenock, while on each bank cars and heavy goods vehicles clog the parallel motorway and arterial road system.
So, I think it’s fairly safe to say that, while there is occasion to applaud our erstwhile invaders on several substantial counts, the jury is still out on the impact of successive COPs, at least as far as UK inland waterways freight is concerned!
Hasty departure
Matters in general – and credibility in particular – were not helped one iota by the antics of British government climate minister Graham Stuart who, by the time the talks kicked off, had persuaded the COP presidency to allow the UK to have a more significant role in the proceedings.
However, despite the critical moments playing out in the UAE, the minister left mid-summit to head to the Commons for a vote on the Tuesday evening before quickly returning to Dubai: a round trip of 6824 miles, gratuitously generating something north of half a tonne of carbon.
As Chiara Liguori, Oxfam's senior climate change policy advisor, observed: “There can be no more tragic outcome for UK climate diplomacy than this – flying home from talks to avert a climate catastrophe, at the most critical moment, in an attempt to salvage a cruel and impractical (immigration) policy.”
So, if this is the big picture – the global climate change view – it’s hardly surprising that the opportunities for moving as much freight as possible within the UK by water get passed up time and time again, however eloquently the environmental case is presented.
Reasoned accounts and wellargued cases for modal shift (more next month) – and the chance to reduce carbon by around 75% – constantly fall on deaf ears… or maybe, as in the case of Graham Stuart, the listening apparatus has simply gone AWOL!
Carpe diem?
We could have relied upon the Romans to seize the day (as they did on a regular basis, throughout a sizeable and stable empire) content to travel and trade the length and breadth of Europe’s seas and rivers.
As War on Want pointed out: “… the agreement reached at COP28 is littered with weaknesses and does not nearly go far enough to stop climate catastrophe, with no mention of actual plans for phasing out fossil fuels, a lack of clear commitments on climate finance and an over-reliance on false and unproven technologies such as carbon capture and storage”.
Nations merely agreed to ‘transition away’ from coal, oil and gas, departing from the earlier stronger language of ‘phasing out fossil fuels’. If only UK transport could look forward to a parallel commitment to managed transition from road to water and rail.
“The lack of an agreement to phase out fossil fuels was devastating,” said Professor Michael Mann, a climatologist and geophysicist at the University of Pennsylvania in the US. “To ‘transition away from fossil fuels’ was weak tea at best.
It’s like promising your doctor that you will ‘transition away from doughnuts’ after being diagnosed with diabetes.”
Mann went on to say: “Mend it, don’t end it”, pointing out that “COPs are our only multilateral framework for negotiating global climate policies. But the failure of COP28 to achieve any meaningful progress at a time when our window of opportunity to limit warming below catastrophic levels is closing, is a source of great concern.”
As Professor Martin Siegert – a polar scientist and deputy vicechancellor at the University of Exeter – said: “The science is perfectly clear. COP28, by not making a clear declaration to stop fossil fuel burning, is a tragedy for the planet and our future. The world is heating faster and more powerfully than the COP response to deal with it.”