For me it's summed up by the £100M tunnel to protect bats. Someone says the nice bats in those nearby woods might not get on with the big scary trains so £100M gets spent to resolve the issue. Scale that kind of thinking up over the whole project including people who don't want HS2 at all using every legal angle imaginable to frustrate it and there's your £66Bn. There are no adults in the room saying you know what, t…
You're right to point out the difficulty in getting projects accomplished in the face of intransigent environmental concerns. But you're also making a strawman argument. This isn't the possibility of "a bat being injured." This is more like the possibility of a subspecies of bat becoming eradicated by destroying their habitat. To be clear, the benefits to high speed transit are probably worth destroying some habitats…
It may seem like an improvement to say that a rail project has to be careful about bats. But left unsaid is that the highway that already exists and competes with rail was never asked to perform such an analysis, and it's likely someone could adding lanes to that highway with much less stringent requirements.
So what is ostensibly environmental law, really ends up being a status quo law - if the status quo is bad for the environment, the law perpetuates it. The headline is about bats and trains, but everything from insects, to animals to people are killed right now - every day - on highways and no one bats an eye.