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Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

According to figures in an OECD report, rail freight has significantly higher CO2 emissions per tonne-km - 41-102g vs 30-40g.

http://www.oecd.org/trade/envtrade/2386636.pdf (p. 29)

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Note that this is for diesel trains. While likely most of the length of the track won’t be electrified soon, essentially all tracks in western Europe (France, Germany, possibly Poland) are already electrified. This means that using nuclear or renewable energy generation, the trains can run emission-free there, in particular avoiding the strongly localised particle emissions by ships in and around harbours.

German electricity is fairly dirty and Polish electricity is absolutely filthy - they're both heavily reliant on coal. Germany is committed to phasing out all of their existing nuclear plants by 2022; Poland has no nuclear capacity and is unlikely to have any before 2030.

Renewables are clearly going to be a growing part of the energy mix, but the issue of base load is still an unanswered question.

https://electricitymap.tmrow.co/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany#Closu... http://www.platts.com/latest-news/electric-power/warsaw/poli...

The electricity may be dirty, the electric train is not. Even with a dirty electricity, an electric train is more efficient than a diesel one (EDIT: braking regeneration).

Most of the length is electrified already. Yekaterinburg-Madrid definitely, Kazakhstan-Yekaterinburg likely, China-Kazakhstan connection and Chinese side probably remains an issue.

I would wager that Chinese and Russian electricity is no cleaner than diesel. They have an awful lot of old coal power stations burning lignite and sub-bituminous coal.

The Chinese source 25% of their electricity from renewables.

US is at 15%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...

Most of Russian generation is natural gas, with notable hydro and nuclear.

Anyway, this is fixable. Planes and ships are not.

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