The government has made the demise of domestic air travel an explicit policy target for the first time by aiming to replace short-haul flights with a new 250mph high-speed rail network.

The transport secretary, Lord Adonis, said switching 46 million domestic air passengers a year to a multibillion-pound north-south rail line was “manifestly in the public interest”. Marking a government shift against aviation, Lord Adonis added that rail journeys should be preferred to plane trips.

There are at least two ways you know it must be Britain. If only we had a Lord Adonis here, damn, his ass would be stinking rich, and we’d make him czar of all the railways.

Actually, it turns out he’s not as pretty as his name might indicate (you can watch him on video at the Guardian article). But he advocates for high-speed rail quite effectively, and he is the transport secretary in Britain, so he might actually be able to get something done.

Which is the second way you know it’s not the US: something might actually happen that big corporations are against. The thing is, Adonis is right that high-speed rail is manifestly better in ecological terms, and therefore we need to do it. Yes, it will drastically change the corporate landscape.

So who gets to decide what that landscape should be? In a democracy, we’re supposed to tell them; but we’ve traded democracy for capitalism, where the powerful rule by definition and don’t even have to assert their rights. Chomsky long ago pointed out the tension between the two opposites, capitalism tending to concentrate power and democracy tending to distribute it.

Suppose we decided to make the demise of domestic air travel an explicit policy target? Of course it would mean something different to do that in the US, which has a much greater land mass than Britain. But imagine the analogy; what would happen? The airlines and their investors would scream bloody murder, and possibly even bloodily murder people, to make sure the government didn’t make such a decision. Wouldn’t they?

Can we turn the US power structures, currently completely in the hands of corporations, back into something we can deal with at a human scale? Or are we headed for a Rollerball future?