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The building of this tunnel will likely create way more CO2, than can be saved by providing a more direct route and avoiding ferries

(german source ... and very critical of the project)

https://www.nabu.de/umwelt-und-ressourcen/verkehr/verkehrsin...

Personally I like the concept of having a more direct access to scandinavia and see lots of other positive long term effects.

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From a Danish perspective I don't really see any positive long, or short, term gains from the Fehmarn tunnel, but I also live in the wrong part of the country.

This is a tunnel for Sweden, Norway and Copenhagen, it's moving the center of everything in Denmark closer and closer to the center of Copenhagen, completely disconnecting the rest of the country. A few days ago a new train start running Copenhagen to Oslo, a seven hour trip. That's the same time it takes me to get to Copenhagen by train within Denmark. Everyone is happy that you can "Get on the train and just pop to Hamburg, Berlin or Prag", but you can't, only if you happen to live in a few select spots does that work. It's a multi-day journey with a layover within the country if I want to leave by rail.

Internationally this is a great project, internally in Denmark, it's going to make international train travel worse for the majority of the country.

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For a 7 hour journey to Copenhagen you must be living in Skagen.

> completely disconnecting the rest of the country

If there's some secret plan to demolish the bridges to Fyn and rip up the roads and railway tracks on Jutland do inform us.

Otherwise, the Århus to Hamburg train will continue to exist.

> It's a multi-day journey with a layover within the country if I want to leave by rail.

No, it isn't.

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Skagen to Flensburg is 7 hours? It’s a painful number of connections, sure, but hardly multi-day. Even going on to Hamburg only adds another couple of hours onto the journey.
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I really hate how German environmental activists resort to hyperbole and alarmist language by default when voicing concerns. This only makes it harder for me to take them seriously.

And then there is this tried and true tradition of commissioning studies with the sole intent to support a predefined viewpoint rather than taking an unbiased approach. This makes it so hard to trust any information when political arguments become heated.

To make the connection back to the tunnel: it consumes a huge amount of concrete and that releases the associated amount of CO2. Thisnpart is fairly easy to estimate. But estimating the impact on traffic emissions is fraught with issues. There are so many assumptions about lifetime, amount of traffic, types of vehicles that I can easily imagine the error bars to stack up to the point where a little tuning of model parameters gives just about any desired result.

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Agreed to that, but they are right with stating, that digging up so much ocean soil in a direct line might disrupt entire maritime ecosystems.
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They are not really comparable are they. One is a rail connection over land and the other is a 130ft deep tunnel for rail and road traffic.
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Well, if we’re comparing CA infra costs, for a more 1-1 comparison you can look at the $9.7B Los Angeles is spending on building out a long-awaited subway line (phase 1 of 3 opened Friday!) and see how tunneling underwater looks like a bargain in comparison.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-05-07/los-ange...

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1USD = 6,35 DKK
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