Offsetting the roughly one billion metric tons of emissions that will be involved in building out the network to 70,000 kilometers will only happen to the extent that trains displace planes and road vehicles — and that process, too, is likely to be slower on lower-density lines.

lmao so we're supposed to just build billions of cars instead? id prefer to just take a train to work or to ride a bike to cover the last mile. its like theyre saying 'china must live in caves while we do emissions pls'

edit: did some research.

the number of cars produced in 2016 was 70 million. average car produces 15.25 tons of c02 on production line. therefore, a single year of car production is a bit over 1 billion tons of c02. lets not forget that cars produce a ton of c02 after the fact and the fact that we need to constantly be building new ones. trains are way better. if these lines is able to cut out cars by even half it will pay for itself in two years in c02 terms. well worth it.