Comment by Neil44
5 hours ago
For me it's summed up by the £100M tunnel to protect bats. Someone says the nice bats in those nearby woods might not get on with the big scary trains so £100M gets spent to resolve the issue. Scale that kind of thinking up over the whole project including people who don't want HS2 at all using every legal angle imaginable to frustrate it and there's your £66Bn.
There are no adults in the room saying you know what, the value to life and society and the good that could be done with £100M of public money is worth more than the unproven possibility of a bat being injured.
One of the good things and assets of this country is our strong legal system and the comparative accessibility of justice, compared to many other places in the world. But this also gets used by people with an axe to grind to frustrate big public projects.
You're right to point out the difficulty in getting projects accomplished in the face of intransigent environmental concerns. But you're also making a strawman argument. This isn't the possibility of "a bat being injured." This is more like the possibility of a subspecies of bat becoming eradicated by destroying their habitat.
To be clear, the benefits to high speed transit are probably worth destroying some habitats, and we need to weigh the social and economic benefits of allowing some level of environmental disruption. Progress comes at a cost. We should be clear about what that cost is.
This argument is undermined by the malign behavior of green activists and their academic allies, who have been caught in the past inventing non-existent new sub-species specifically so they can use the endangered species argument to block construction projects.
A notorious case is the snail darter, invented to block construction of the Tellico Dam in Tennessee. It was the first legal test of the US Endangered Species Act and it was fraudulent [1]. This raises huge questions about how the Endangered Species Act is actually being used, if the very first test case was about a species that scientists now think doesn't really exist as a separate thing at all.
Another case is the California Gnatcatcher, which is not an endangered kind of bird, but green NIMBYs argued under the ESA that the coastal California Gnatcatcher was a different species that would be endangered by construction. They have successfully kept the "coastal" variant of the bird listed as an endangered species for decades, which regularly blocks or slows down construction in CA.
They love this game! After all, what defines a species? It's a vague concept and the taxonomists who decide whether something is a new species are academics, who are all on the far left. Nothing stops them publishing a paper that concludes the animals next to any planned project are unique and special snowflakes that must be protected, purely because they just want to block progress.
To put the scale of this problem in perspective, last year taxonomists "discovered" 260 new species of freshwater fish alone [2]. They claim that hundreds of unique kinds of fish escaped notice for centuries, that this happens every year, and each one of those kinds of fish is critical to preserve. Is this plausible?
[1] https://yibs.yale.edu/news/fish-center-key-conservation-figh...
[2] https://fishkeepingnews.com/2025/03/04/260-new-freshwater-fi...
> They claim that somehow hundreds of unique kinds of river/lake fish escaped notice for centuries, that this happens every year, and each one of those kinds of fish is critical to preserve. Is this plausible?
I don't disagree with the premise that environmental laws are being abused by people with ancillary agendas, but arguably humans have been underestimating the complexity of ecological systems for generations, incorrectly assuming that we understand everything well enough to manage and control our impacts without long tail side effects.
It may well be plausible that there are many hundreds of undiscovered fish species out there, and that interfering with any subset of them could cascade into other consequences. We've certainly been learning a lot about the impacts of dams on fisheries in recent years—changes made centuries ago that had profound long term effects on our food supply, to take a tangible example.
> have been caught in the past inventing non-existent new sub-species
That's not what happened, and your own links fail to support your narrative. It was genuinely believed - before the passing of the act - that the recently-discovered snail darter was a distinct species. It is still disputed whether it's a distinct species, unique sub-species, distinct population segment, or none of the above. The first three of these would still afford it protections under the Endangered Species Act.
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As I understand it, the issue currently is that there's not really a framework for justifying or balancing those costs. Right now, the bat conservation people point out that the route will potentially eradicate a particular subspecies of bat. That gets sent up to the planning team, who now attempt to figure out a solution that prevents that from happening, and figures out how much that will cost. But what you probably want in between those points is someone to decide how much is too much to spend on the bats.
We do this for other stuff - for example, the NHS in the UK has a system called QALYs (Quality Adjusted Life Years) which represent how much a particular treatment will extend someone's life, adjusted by the quality of that life. You can then calculate a cost per QALY for a new treatment, and make a decision about what costs are worthwhile for the NHS to pay for, and what aren't.
Something like that that could apply to planning permission decisions would be very useful for national infrastructure projects.
For me the contradiction is simply how much of the status quo doesn't have to justify itself with those rules.
It may seem like an improvement to say that a rail project has to be careful about bats. But left unsaid is that the highway that already exists and competes with rail was never asked to perform such an analysis, and it's likely someone could adding lanes to that highway with much less stringent requirements.
So what is ostensibly environmental law, really ends up being a status quo law - if the status quo is bad for the environment, the law perpetuates it. The headline is about bats and trains, but everything from insects, to animals to people are killed right now - every day - on highways and no one bats an eye.
> To be clear, the benefits to high speed transit are probably worth destroying some habitats, and we need to weigh the social and economic benefits of allowing some level of environmental disruption. Progress comes at a cost. We should be clear about what that cost is.
Do you have a sense of how to approach the question of “cost” for this particular bat case?
When destroying an entire habitat (let’s assume we can define the boundaries of that habitat and it is mostly unique), do you have a sense of how to compute the cost given the multitude of species, geographical feedback loops, etc.?
Much more measured and thoughtful than I would have been, but I think you're exactly right. I don't know the first thing about bats but even I know their populations have been devastated by some kind of white fungus virus, or the "clean windshield" phenomenon associated with the devastating collapsing insect populations they probably depend on, and so it's not a big leap to think $100MM project is being mobilized in the face of a serious existential threat to their survival.
If the best you could think of is that "a" bat might "possibly" get injured it's a dramatic understatement of the kind of environmental threats they face. And you don't have to be anything more than a bit of a news junkie to know that.
> For me it's summed up by the £100M tunnel to protect bats. Someone says […]
That someone is Natural England, who is tasked, by law, with enforcing laws that protect wildlife and the environment and needs to sign off on disruptive work:
> A spokesperson for HS2 Ltd said "multiple options" had been considered, including green bridges and restoring habitats, to "comply with laws protecting vulnerable species".
> It said through "extensive engagement" with Natural England, "a covered structure was designed".
* https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9wryxyljglo
If you don't like it change the law so that the environment/wildlife isn't protected, or these kinds of sign offs are not requirement, or can be overrided in the enacting legislation of infrastructure projects.
> If you don't like it change the law
There is currently a bill going through Parliament to simplify this stuff - https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3946 - though not going so far as to remove all protections.
"But the law says they have to" is just a fancy way of saying you've outsourced your morals to the legislature.
The fact that there is a law saying this drag must be applied does not make it right. I'm fully aware we need to protect natural species, not create fire risks, etc, etc, but the idea that every project must incur cost to prove up front that it is complete is an asinine drag on everything, especially seeing as like 99.9% of projects are effectively compliant from the get go and the bulk of the time wasting consists of circulating correspondance and nit picking to this effect.
> "But the law says they have to" is just a fancy way of saying you've outsourced your morals to the legislature.
Some folks don't have morals and so legislation is enacted to act as a floor for bad behaviour.
you've outsourced your morals to the legislature
That's basically the whole point of a representative government, no?
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There is definitely a long gap between "Don't care about env at all" and "Preventing everything being built because it hassles some small animal". I'm afraid and you and many people are biasing towards the other end even if you believe you are a white knight.
Anyway, I'm not in UK so I don't care. Good luck.
The legal basis is there to protect wildlife from man-made disruption and provides a kind of ecological basis to limit the kind of boundless growth that politicians appeal to.
Unfortunately, for those laws to be effective, they have to be strong enough to beat the various legal shenanigans / loopholes which can be used by developers to effortlessly leapfrog them.
Finally, if the laws are strong enough, they might be effortlessly wielded to prevent even reasonable developments from occurring.
The law lands somewhere in the middle and I think there are always people at either extreme trying to take advantage.
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Thank you for that non-caring contribution
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Be careful when getting irate about aledged "Health & Safety" or "Ecological" oe other money wasting. The facts are often different than they first appear: https://jeffollerton.co.uk/2025/01/31/no-the-hs2-bat-tunnel-...
I read your link and it does not support your view that the facts are different than they appear. He calculates a bit differently (including not just currently living bats but those bats yet unborn) but still I feel the tunnel was not necessary
You're looking at someone saying "look at this tiny pothole and how awful it is on a road" when 50 yards further down there's a massive chasm.
It's a distraction technique as old as the hills, and implies the blame for the missing 100b is because of bat boxes, while others run off with the remaining 99b.
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When this one comes up I always point out it would be better to not bother with HS2 and spend the money on making it easier for people not to have to travel around.
Great, but it's also a goods corridor; the only way around both of those at the same time (absent massive depopulation) is to move the people, would mean building loads more houses.
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I think bats can be particularly vulnerable to new development due to their commuting habits and slow rate of reproduction. Although, the engineering solution here does seem crazy. I am far more angry about the unnecessary tunnelling for dubious landscape reasons. The Chilterns is nice, but spending such vast amounts is unjustified. Better to spend a smaller amount of money improving the actual environment rather than peoples perception of it.
From my abroad ivory tower it just looked like the torries were trying to extract as much money for their friends as possible and got away with it too. But that's just my personal, likely biased, observation.
If you have little information, it's a decent rule of thumb.
> Someone says the nice bats in those nearby woods might not get on with the big scary trains so £100M gets spent to resolve the issue.
That is an issue with many projects in the US. Reasonable and well-intentioned environmental regulations are created, but then used as political cudgels in bad faith to derail projects for NIMBY or other reasons of self interest.
It’s not an easy problem to solve.
Were they really reasonable and well intentioned if they were written with these faults and people supported them as such?
California's notorious CEQA was originally intended only to apply to public projects, but the State Supreme Court bizarrely decided to interpret it to as written cover pretty much any construction, public or private, presumably plugging their ears and singing when the legislature attempted to clarify that that was never the intent of the law.
Course have subsequently expanded it's purview beyond parody, such that a law that was written with the goal of preventing contaminated rivers from catching fire now requires a housing developer to study the potential "environmental impact" college students getting a bit too noisy would have on the surrounding neighborhood.
Likely they were side effects that nobody thought of until people started using them after the regulations were created.
Your comment has nothing to do with the article, or the differing approach of the Swiss (who I'm sure also have legal protection for endangered species).
> There are no adults in the room saying you know what, the value to life and society and the good that could be done with £100M of public money is worth more than the unproven possibility of a bat being injured.
Remember if these adults were in the room, the political cohort angry about the bat tunnel wouldn't have been able to stop low-traffic neighbourhood schemes, cycle paths, air-quality regulations, Manchester's congestion charge, etc.
> £100M gets spent to resolve the issue
It's even worse than it first appears. There's no evidence that the trains will have any impact on the bats AND there's equally scant evidence that a tunnel will protect the bats from this entirely theoretical harm.
My guess is the tunnel will become the preferred roosting spot for the bats.
>There are no adults in the room saying you know what, the value to life and society and the good that could be done with £100M of public money is worth more than the unproven possibility of a bat being injured.
Everyone knows it's stupid but they're doing it anyway.
The problem is that legislation and rules and official policy and precedents have added up and added up over the years to the point where nobody can say "screw this, we're not studying your stupid bats, we're building the tunnel, come back if you think the bats have been negatively affected".
And the whole thing top to bottom in every area is like this and it forces out or kills the ambition of and subjugates anyone who tries to to better. And even if those people did magically appear they would be facing a system that has spent generations getting stacked with people who are opposed to doing things and taking responsibility (because everyone else washes out or converts). It's a bad system and it naturally fills itself with bad people.
And this isn't news to anyone who's had to interface with government in a capacity other than the low common denominator consumer stuff (permits for basic stuff, licenses of various types) that is generally polished less those people start questioning the utility of these organizations knows this.
Legalistic culture made the UK into the world’s largest empire by allowing it to effectively organize huge numbers of people. But it seems to be a liability in the diminished nation that remains, with those powerful energies focused inward instead of outward.
That's all noise that the press likes to trump up. Sure 5% of the cost might be on "silly things" like bat tunnels or hedghog bridges, but that doesn't make or break a project.
Actually delivering smaller projects at a rapid pace on an understood roadmap as advocated by the article is very different to delivering a big flashy project which delivers nothing until it's all delivered.
Its more like how the UKs motorway network was built. In 1963 the M6 J13-15 opened. At that time there was nothing north or south of it, but it started delivering benefits immediately. The following year J15 to Preston opened, anyone heading south was still dumped onto traditional roads though, but again massive benefits. The cross country link from Birmingham to the M1 didn't open until 1971, but by then people had had a decade of benefiting from both motorways. It also followed a different route, the M45 for example fell by the roadside as requirements changed, that's fine - requirements will change. Build towards a vision, but make it usable faster and quicker.
Of course software people no longer like "Agile"
If you can’t even stop expenditures that lack credible explanations, of why it’s worth it, then how do you know it is a “strong legal system”?