*Building the line* has a massive environmental impact, so they're not wrong as such.
The risk of course is doing what has been done with HS2 in the UK, all the environmental damage before killing most of the project and thus no end benefit*.
* Unless you count enriching your tory donors by selling them the cancelled land secretly within hours of cancelling the project.
All the reasonable alternatives pollute more long term. Nobody will accept the idea that they should become a subsistence farmer that never goes farther from home than he can walk (sexism intended).
This is how environmental political activism works: file lawsuits against some new thing because it isn't absolutely perfectly non-polluting and eco-friendly, and force everyone to keep using some old system that's highly polluting and an ecological disaster. For another great example, see nuclear power.
The risk of course is doing what has been done with HS2 in the UK, all the environmental damage before killing most of the project and thus no end benefit*.
* Unless you count enriching your tory donors by selling them the cancelled land secretly within hours of cancelling the project.