Until the rise of the budget airlines in Europe during the Nineties, short-haul air travel was an expensive business. For journeys under about 500 miles, trains were cheaper.

Now, it’s a different story. I’ve just been looking at travel between Milan and Rome this coming July. It’s a distance of 355 miles between the two cities. Since the collapse of Alitalia, easyJet and Ryanair have been taken over domestic flights in Italy. A one-way ticket on easyJet is 23.99 euros and takes an hour. Yet on one of the fast trains, taking 4hours, roughly equivalent to the total city centre to city centre time by plane, the fare is 55 euros if you buy two weeks in advance.

And in Britain, the situation can be even crazier. Air travel can now often be the cheapest form of travel. My retired father found that it was cheaper to travel from his home in Luton by easyJet to Glasgow in Scotland than by National Express (Britain’s version of Greyhound). And that was with National Express’s Over 60′s discount included as well! The flight takes about an hour compared with ten hours on the coach. What option would you choose?

If the European Union is serious about reducing carbon emissions from air travel, then it needs to look at ways of making longer-distance train travel within the EU cheaper and easier.

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And why am I not interested? Because I’ve just been watching the eco-movie HOME. It’s beautifully filmed in High Definition and it has an important message.

For millions of years, the Earth has been storing up the carbon that threatens the planet’s survival. Over the last fifty years in particular, human beings have been extremely efficient at releasing it to power their lifestyles. And now the planet can’t cope any more.

It made me think how irrelevant many things in modern western life are, including supercars. The Veyron is an engineering masterpiece. It took a great deal of time and money to produce a car as fast as a Formula 1 car that can also be used on the road. That’s actually quite a technological achievement. But why couldn’t Ferdinand Piech, the then head of VAG, have turned his talented engineers loose on a more environmentally-useful project?

We’re destroying this planet faster than it can renew itself. People are busily fighting wars with each other, but climate change could kill us all unless we unite to deal with it.

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