Happy New Year! On Monday, we start tweeting about #AdamSmith 's whole #WealthOfNations at the rate of about a chapter a day! Don’t miss it! #WealthOfTweets #SmithTweets

Today, we’re looking at “The Introduction and Plan of the Work” because although it is New Year’s Day, we, the SmithTweeters, are still Very Serious Smith Scholars. #WealthOfTweets #SmithTweets
TFW you start reading “The Introduction and Plan of the Work” and realize that elevator speeches were invented before elevators. #WealthOfTweets #SmithTweets
How hard people work &how many are working is more important to national wealth than resources &climate. So much for Montesquieu et al saying climate determines levels of industriousness or laziness. (Int. 3) #WealthOfTweets #SmithTweets
We swear we’re going to come back to Smith and this “savage nations” phrase he keeps dropping. We just can’t do it on January 1st. (Int. 4) #WealthOfTweets #SmithTweets
The mystery he wants to solve is why in poorer nations people seem to be working all the time while in wealthier nations they have so much more leisure. How do nations move from one state to another? (Int 4) #WealthOfTweets #SmithTweets
That’s the crucial thing to remember about Wealth of Nations. We aren’t trying to solve the mystery of poverty. Poverty/subsistence is the natural state of humans. We’re trying to solve the mystery of wealth. #WealthOfTweets #SmithTweets
Don’t forget to join us on Monday for Book One, Chapter One of Smith’s Wealth of Nations! #WealthOfTweets #SmithTweets
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@danielashby @AdamWJT @Greens4HS2 @TheGreenParty @GarethDennis @XRebellionUK @Hs2RebelRebel @HS2ltd I'll bite. Let's try to keep it factual. There's a reasonable basis to some aspects of this question, that it might be possible to agree on. Then there are other, more variable, elements which depend on external factors such as transport and energy policy. /1

@AdamWJT @Greens4HS2 @TheGreenParty @GarethDennis @XRebellionUK @Hs2RebelRebel @HS2ltd First up, we know reasonably well how much energy it takes to propel a high-speed train along the HS2 route. We can translate that into effective CO2 generated by making some assumptions about how green the electricity grid is. /2

@AdamWJT @Greens4HS2 @TheGreenParty @GarethDennis @XRebellionUK @Hs2RebelRebel @HS2ltd Secondly, we have a reasonable grasp of how much CO2 is going to be generated by building HS2 - there are standard methods of working this out, based on the amount of steel, concrete, earthmoving, machine-fuelling etc required. /3

@AdamWJT @Greens4HS2 @TheGreenParty @GarethDennis @XRebellionUK @Hs2RebelRebel @HS2ltd Thirdly, we can estimate how much CO2 is generated by cutting down trees, and how much is captured by planting new trees. We can also estimate how much CO2 is needed to keep the railway running and generated by maintaining the track /4

@AdamWJT @Greens4HS2 @TheGreenParty @GarethDennis @XRebellionUK @Hs2RebelRebel @HS2ltd We know how much CO2 is saved by moving goods by freight train on the lines freed up by moving the express trains on to HS2, rather than by truck. /5

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