High Viz Kim goes to Tokyo

Green deals, long flights, and how quickly public trust evaporates

The new North East mayor, Kim McGuinness, has just posted a glossy clip from central Tokyo. Night skyline behind her, traffic rolling past, phone held selfie style. The caption promises “Greener public transport and 200 new green energy jobs” for the region, “from Japan”.

On the video itself, bright green text shouts:

• GREENER PUBLIC TRANSPORT
• 200 GREEN ENERGY JOBS

The problem is not the idea of cleaner transport or new jobs. The problem is that the announcement comes from a long haul trip to Tokyo, funded from the public purse, in the middle of a climate crisis. In the comments, she has already picked up a new nickname: “High Viz Kim”.

The Tokyo selfie and the carbon tab

A return flight between London and Tokyo is roughly nineteen thousand kilometres in total, before you even add Newcastle connections at each end. Government emission factors put a long haul passenger at roughly three tonnes of CO2 equivalent for that sort of return trip in economy. That is a rough figure, but it is good enough for scale.

We do not know how many people travelled with the mayor. A realistic guess for a delegation is at least three or four people. Multiply that out and you are comfortably in the range of ten to twelve tonnes of CO2 equivalent burned on one overseas announcement.

For comparison, global average emissions sit at only a few tonnes per person per year. One climate branded visit by High Viz Kim likely used up two or three average humans’ entire annual carbon budget.

All of this for a video that could have been recorded in front of a bus depot in Byker.

Hitachi is not exactly hard to find from Newcastle

The spin is simple. “We had to go to Japan to bring green jobs home.”

Except Hitachi is already here. Hitachi Rail has a major factory at Newton Aycliffe in County Durham, within easy reach of the North East. Hitachi has a long standing UK and European footprint, senior executives based in this country, and entire teams whose job is to deal with UK government and regions.

So the obvious questions are:

• What exactly could only be achieved by flying the mayor to Tokyo in person?
• Why was this not handled through Hitachi’s UK operations or a visit to Newton Aycliffe?
• Where is the written assessment that ruled out Zoom, Teams, or a UK based signing?

If there are good answers, they have not been given to the public. Instead, we got a skyline selfie.

The comment section has already joined the dots

The public reaction under reposts of the clip is blunt and, frankly, fair.

People ask why video conferencing was not used. They point out that Hitachi has European headquarters and a large plant in County Durham. Others describe the trip as “another photo opportunity”, a “freebie”, or simply ask who has paid for the holiday.

This is not fringe outrage. It is normal people seeing a pattern they recognise.

They are being told to cut back, take fewer flights, accept higher costs on fuel and transport, and change their habits in the name of climate policy. Then they open Facebook and see the new mayor on what looks a lot like a taxpayer funded winter city break in Tokyo, wrapped in green rhetoric.

Does the climate benefit ever catch up?

Supporters will argue that any emissions from the trip will be outweighed by the benefits of cleaner buses and green energy jobs. That can be true in some cases. The climate benefit of electric buses is real when they actually enter service and start replacing diesel mileage.

The key word here is “necessary”.

For the trip to make sense environmentally, it would need to be true that this particular flight to Tokyo was essential to unlock these deals, and that they would not have gone ahead through existing UK channels.

Hitachi was already manufacturing low carbon transport in the North East. UK national and regional bodies have already been signing large contracts with them. The idea that nothing could progress without High Viz Kim personally flying to Tokyo in November is a very big claim, and it has been made with no evidence.

If the deals would have happened anyway through UK negotiation or Hitachi UK, then the flight is not a climate investment. It is simply extra emissions with nicer lighting.

Public money, private itinerary

There is also the question of cost.

Long haul flights to Japan are not cheap, especially if booked close to departure or in business class. Hotels in central Tokyo are not cheap either. Add per diems, on the ground transport, staff time and the opportunity cost of senior leaders being absent from the region in the run up to Christmas, and this will not be a small bill.

That might still be justifiable if three conditions were met:

• The trip was genuinely indispensable.
• The details were published in full.
• The carbon impact and reasoning were set out clearly.

At the moment, none of that has happened. We have a short social video, a “green revolution” caption, and residents asking who funded High Viz Kim’s Tokyo city break.

The questions that now need formal answers

If this trip is such a strategic win for the North East, the region should not have to reverse engineer it from Instagram style clips. People are entitled to numbers and reasoning.

At minimum, the Combined Authority should publish:

• A full breakdown of the cost of the trip, including flights, class of travel, accommodation, per diems and other expenses.
• The names and roles of everyone who travelled, and why each person needed to be there in person.
• A carbon impact estimate using recognised government methodology.
• An options appraisal that shows how remote or UK based alternatives were considered and why they were rejected.
• Key documents for the deals that were supposedly signed in Japan, and what stage they had reached before anyone boarded a plane.

Anything less looks like “fly out, film a clip, come home with a press release” politics.

Why this matters

This is not about opposing green jobs or cleaner buses. It is about climate credibility and basic respect for the people who pay the bills.

If ordinary residents are going to be asked to change how they travel, heat their homes and spend their money, then the people who lead them must at least try to model the same standards. You do not maintain trust by telling families to fly less while you treat long haul flights as a standard backdrop for every “green” announcement.

High Viz Kim has chosen to make herself the face of this trip. That comes with responsibility. If she believes this Tokyo visit was a good use of public money and carbon, she should show her working in full.

Until that happens, many people in the North East will remember this not as the moment the green energy revolution arrived, but as the moment their new mayor looked straight into the camera from the other side of the planet and asked them to applaud her for it.