A little over a week ago, Deputy Climate Change Minister Lee Waters delivered a devastating blow to the motorists of mid Wales, outlining that the vast majority of road improvement projects for Wales were to be cancelled.

While no overall value was placed on the worth of the projects to be cancelled, a layman’s accounting would place the sum of those shelved works at close to £1.75 billion — give or take a few million.

In this case, it’s a take.

As the title of his portfolio suggests, the road projects were cancelled because they no longer meet the strict criteria formulated by the Welsh Government — they won’t help this nation meet its climate change goals.

As a result of this, millions of pounds worth of projects across Powys, Gwynedd and Ceredigion are now dead in the water.

Gone are badly needed projects such as improvements on the A44, the A470 and the A487. If you’ve driven those roads — there are few others that get you anywhere anytime — you’ll only be too aware that they fall far below the standards of similar A roads to the east of our national borders.

A proposed third crossing into Anglesey was axed — a decision that comes at a time when one of the other two is undergoing critical structural works as a matter of urgency.

And for the long-suffering people of Llanbedr, their on-again, off-again much-needed £16 million bypass didn’t make the list of cancelled nor proposed works — it was cancelled last November anyway. The fact the road project announcement came within hours of Llanbedr’s space port receiving a cash boost seems to suggest that the left hand of the Welsh Government doesn’t seem to know what its right is doing.

Indeed, that is the case when it comes to transport anyway. For weeks now, the people of this region have been bombarded with cut after cut to the bus services because of too little funding and too poor timetables.

We have a third-world train service. Those who want the north-south rail link have been sidelined by policy wonks in Cardiff. Carno has no station. New trains are years away, so too timetable improvements.

If Mr Waters is really serious about climate change, he would announce a similar £1.75bn investment in public transport — not that we would get a fair share here.

That’s why these cuts are so hard to swallow.­