How China built the best high-speed rail ever

China built almost 40,000 kilometers of high-speed rails in just over a decade. Meanwhile, dreams for a similar high-speed train systems in the EU and US have been consistently derailed. How did China do it? And at what cost? We're destroying our environment at an alarming rate. But it doesn't need to be this way. Our new channel Planet A explores the shift towards an eco-friendly world — and challenges our ideas about what dealing with climate change means. We look at the big and the small: What we can do and how the system needs to change. Every Friday we'll take a truly global look at how to get us out of this mess. #PlanetA #HighSpeedTrain #China Read More (Links): Research paper modeling high-speed rail’s offset of emissions: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254419796_Can_high_speed_rail_offset_its_embedded_emissions Asia Development Bank Report 2019: https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/504076/adbi-wp959.pdf World Bank report on China’s construction costs: https://documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/documents-reports/documentdetail/695111468024545450/high-speed-railways-in-china-a-look-at-construction-costs IEA Future of Rails Report: https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/fb7dc9e4-d5ff-4a22-ac07-ef3ca73ac680/The_Future_of_Rail.pdf European Court of Auditors report on EU’s High-Speed rail: https://op.europa.eu/webpub/eca/special-reports/high-speed-rail-19-2018/en/ 0:00 Intro 0:58 High-speed history 1:55 How China did it 4:44 Human – and creature – costs 6:01 Geopolitical goals 6:54 Airline problems 8:32 Comparison to other countries Reporter: Beina Xu Camera: Beina Xu Video editor: Henning Göll Supervising editor: Kiyo Dörrer