The Swedish Minister of the Environment, Andreas Carlgren, suggests a further 50% capacity of carriage of passenger and cargo before 2020. According to Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet the Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt in an earlier interview said that the suggestion was ”unrealistic”. That is the the hook from the newspaper Dagens Nyheter.
The suggestions to increase the train capacity emanates from the Government Offices ”Klimatberedningen” (Climate Advisory Committee).
According to the Minister of the Environment the increased train capacity would save another million tonnes of carbon dioxide. Well, that is good.
But actually, the real incentive for increasing the train capacity should be to maintain capacity for welfare. With rising costs for oil and the insight of the necessity to curb other fossil sources of energy, it is quite obvious that we need more capacity to travel by train. Not because it is ”climate friendly” (that is a positive side effect), but because we then can produce transportation services for passenger and cargo without the need of sources of energy that most likely will not be available in the future. And the future is not as far away as 2020.