Finally. It's really frustrating to see how heavily subsidized airlines, plane fuel and airports are and how big of a tax breaks they get when they come to a city.
At the same time people are shamed for buying salad in a plastic bag when the big lever is somewhere completely different. Had the same thought yesterday when I saw:
International Air Travel is one of the most heavily taxed, if not the most heavily taxed, activity. It's not unusual for the taxes to exceed the ticket price. Here I just looked on kayak for a flight from SFO to Berlin. Here is the price breakdown:
Ticket price USD 465.00
Taxes, Fees and charges USD 540.52
---------
International/Domestic Surcharge USD 350.00
APHIS User Fee USD 3.96
Immigration User Fee USD 7.00
Customs User Fee USD 5.77
United States International Departure Tax USD 18.60
United States International Arrival Tax USD 18.60
Passenger Civil Aviation Security Service Fee USD 5.60
Air Transport Tax USD 46.58
German Aviation Security Charge 19.15
Passenger Service Charge - Intl USD 23.95
Passenger Service Charge - Dom. USD 36.81
Passenger Facility Charge USD 4.50
Total price USD 1,005.52
Take-off and landing account for a lot more pollution than a flight in cruising altitude on long trips. That's why we usually talk about the problematic domestic flights where trains are an alternative. There's not really a good alternative for long haul flights.
Flights within Europe are not that heavily taxed, otherwise I wouldn't be able to fly Berlin - Brussels for 9 Euros.
Wait, Berlin to Brussels for €9? Good lord, that is far too cheap. For example, the distance is roughly equivalent to Denver-Albuquerque. Kayak's cheapest quote is $119 one way, scheduled 1 month in advance. I knew flights in Europe were cheaper, but how is it possible to operate profitably at that price? Kayak shows $23 for Ryanair Berlin-Brussels.
For comparison, I had a vehicle breakdown and needed to take an (awful) bus that distance in the US, and it cost far more than $23 (IIRC, it was ~$75 and took 18 hours).
Ryanair,which is pretty successful business, is essentially a flying kiosk. The tickets are cheap but you pay for everything else.We had a company trip from London to Ibiza. Throughout the entire flight stewardess hasn't managed to wheel out the trolley with drinks,because there was a constant queue of 10-15 people buying alcohol. An average pub on Friday night doesn't sell as many drinks as they did on that flight. They also make tons of money from car rental,hotel, insurance referrals and many other upsells. No one in his own mind would otherwise think that running a plane that costs tens of millions of dollars with tickets worth €9 can be profitable.
9 euros isn’t the actual cost: it’s a loss leader for selling you other stuff for the flight. Also, that 9 euros doesn’t include taxes. Conversely, why are train tickets so expensive? Perhaps trains are overtaxed, or maybe less efficient?
Yes, the huge taxes are generally for international flights, and I think part of the reason is that, as you say, there aren't a lot of options for those flights so they have a captive market and are thus better able to bear those taxes. If you start with punitive taxes on domestic flights in the EU, it will disproportionately hit the airline industry there.
As with many things, the game with taxes is how to make the incidence of the tax fall more on the consumer and less on the producer. If you can accomplish that, then the tax is more likely to get through because unfortunately we don't have consumer lobbyists anywhere as strong as the business lobbyists.
This doesn't explain why Norwegian are above to fly transatlantic for as low as $104 one-way (PVD-DUB on Feb 5th). I know that Providence airport likely charges lower fees, but it demonstrates how little "tax" is being paid on international flights.
That depends on the product being taxed.
I learned this in econ101 that the price elasticity of demand determines who bears the bulk of a tax. I don’t have references in my old textbooks handy, but here is exactly the same concept as I learned it[1]
Basically, if demand for a product is inelastic (eg. cigarettes, insulin) that will pretty much be 100% passed on to customers by the business. You can see the supplied link for examples where the seller has no choice but to eat the tax (or most of it) or people will just stop purchasing.
Because these are extremely subsidised. Besides that, those airlines use every dark pattern in the book, so most people end up paying significantly more.
The taxes here amount to 8,33% of the total ticket price.
The rest are actual charges that airports/government services levy for work done, as well as the famed fuel surcharge (usually recently noted as international/domestic surcharge) that airlines use as an wildcard addendum to the base fare of the ticket.
If you exclude the airport fees and whatnot, you can’t claim that flights are heavily subsidized. The airport fees pay for all the capital infrastructure airlines use. (Trains also use capital infrastructure paid for by governments.)
Most of these “taxes” aren’t really taxes in the sense of the tax on petrol or alcohol. They’re charges to cover the direct cost of flying, a bit like a toll road
Taxes pay for roads and socialized medicine, in the case of petrol/alcohol/cigarette taxes. Just because they're not direct or itemized, doesn't mean they don't apply in a similar way.
Actually. Taxes aren't even close to being the highest bit.
The parts that are taxes are:
APHIS User Fee USD 3.96
Immigration User Fee USD 7.00
Customs User Fee USD 5.77
United States International Departure Tax USD 18.60
United States International Arrival Tax USD 18.60
Passenger Civil Aviation Security Service Fee USD 5.60
Air Transport Tax USD 46.58
German Aviation Security Charge 19.15
The majority of the charges are airport services. But they typically just put everything with Taxes, so you think it's taxes.
That international/domestic surcharge looks like an airline imposed charge. Not sure why they do it that way instead of having it in the ticket price. But the actual taxes paid on this ticket are a lot less when that surcharge isn’t included.
It appears that it's sometimes because it's easier in terms of internal accounting for airlines to adjust pricing that way. In other cases, some taxes may be a percentage of the fare, not the surcharge, allowing a lower all-inclusive price with the same amount of profit for the airline.
In Germany consumer electricity prices have a comparable fraction of taxes and fees. So do salaries for high-paying jobs. If these levels are tolerable we can certainly go higher.
The whole passenger air travel industry (airlines, aircraft manufacturers, airports, etc) is subsidized because they’re not profitable on their own. But a robust and affordable air travel network is a capability the business world needs to operate our economy.
Boeing and Airbus are two of the most heavily subsidized companies in the world, and the airlines themselves aren’t far behind. They’re both high-risk, low-margin businesses.
I don't have a source for that but I'd say if the airlines etc wouldn't be so subsidized there would be higher focus on developing better engines, electric planes or other technologies than in the current state where losses will just be covered by the tax payer. They wouldn't just stop operating and the "business world" would most likely not collapse.
I've talked to a bunch of people that get flown around by their company for 2h meetings at airports within Germany every day. If these wouldn't happen and would be done via video conferencing or other means that would be an improvement. Business will find a way to make it work.
As the 737 Max has shown, this isn’t exactly the industry you want to “move fast and break things” by attempting to try out every late and great technology. Then there is just an issue with the business model in general. Customers typically make their purchasing decision on the lowest cost option, things like the weather are out of your control, there’s huge capital investments needed, and there’s a high risk if anything goes wrong.
This is exactly what has happened — the 787 is the result, and is hugely popular with airlines. But the operational life of a big jet is measured in decades, and there are plenty of 50-year-old airframes in regular operation today.
They have two Curtiss C-46 from 1945. Its interesting that its cheaper to continue to pay for the maintenance and fuel than lease something more modern.
Replacements don’t exist. Those old prop liners can operate off unimproved dirt strips, grass, even snow and ice - and off short runways too.
Jets don’t like that.
For back country missions the only thing maybe better than a DC-3 is a Basler... and that is a modernized DC-3 with reinforcements and turboprops for more power. They suck a lot more fuel than a plain DC3 though, which can be problematic as some of these fields they have to fly fuel in.
do you have any idea how many carbon emissions are created with a two hour meeting? The network, the video servers, the laptop/desktops - the monitors, the A/C to cool each of those people at the distributed locations?
While it is valid to bring this up, I'm pretty sure the emissions and energy usage of a videoconference are minuscule in comparison to the flights that are replaced. Laptops will be needed in both cases, as well as A/C (if that is necessary at all).
This is funny, because the reason they are not profitable on their own is because they don't need to, since they are subsidized.
Competition makes those companies use any cost-saving they can. If the government takes an option away, they'll just all not use it anymore and settle down on a higher price.
There’s an element of realpolitik here too: a predictable side effect of ending subsidies for the aerospace industry is that the business would shift to a country that does subsidize. Those companies build a lot of operational knowledge that is super useful — to the point of being a major strategic advantage — in wartime. It also makes you beholden to that country (and subsequent economic sphere of influence) strategically. Governments are responsible for more than just the economy.
Competition between governments is also a thing, and I think we’re already seeing it matter as part of a pullback on globalization with respect to China.
Many Republicans are in favor of subsidies of industries like Boeing when they are in their district. I expect they would describe themselves as believers in small government.
And let's not resort to the No True Scotsman fallacy ...
I was making the point that just because something is 'recent' doesn't mean it isn't necessary and we can go without because 20-50-100 years ago it wasn't needed.
The world changes. I travel all over the world for business. Contracts that I couldn't do without that travel. Just because 50 years ago I wouldn't be able to do it, doesn't mean it isn't necessary now. (Same as internet, just because 50 years ago you didn't need, or have, the internet, doesn't mean nowadays is an integral part of business)
well they need it to operate the economy in the way that it has been operated as of late. which is to say: maybe if we take that away from them, we could solve two problems at once? Pollution from air travel, and all the societal problems that a globalized economy without meaningfully global regulation brings?
If it’s the case that international air travel makes companies more competitive, all you’ll really be able to do is to further stratify the winners from the rest of the pack by sharply increasing the cost of air travel.
Airliner manufacturing isn't low margin, by far. Airbus reported EBIT €5.8bn on €64bn revenues for 2018. 9% profitability is pretty good for durable goods company.
Airlines aren't all exactly on paper thin margins. Southwest operates at about 15% margin
Apple, the posterchild of high margins, reported profits of $14bn on $62bn revenues for Q4 2018... that's 22%.
If you want low margins, look at retailers.
I don't know about businesses but I also think that international passengers travel is an important part of world peace. Being able to visit other countries and learn about different cultures really brings intolerance and nationalism down.
I wish it was mandatory for every student to visit two or three very different countries during their studies.
I understand the emissions are problematic and we need to cut them down. I like the idea of forbidding or de-incentivizing air travel on short trips when a rail alternative exists. I just wish we put that at the bottom of the priority list. Remove coal plants and fuel cars first.
> I wish it was mandatory for every student to visit two or three very different countries during their studies.
That was common in the 80s & 90s but we did it wearing a backpack and hopping on buses and coaches and sleeper trains; air travel was much too expensive back then.
That's in contrast to modern Ryanair-style stag-party 'tourism' where students descend on a city for a few days and then zip back home.
Buses and backpack won't expose you to different culture. Esp, in a country as big as the US. Unless you live close to the southern border, you won't even be exposed to people speaking a different language, which is an important thing to experience.
We travel to get away from the hell holes we created locally, just to then turn those destinations into carbon copies of the places we were trying to escape from.
Aviation hurts the climate in multiple ways of which CO2 emissions are just one. Vapor trails apparently contribute even more to anthropogenic climate change. Overall the contribution of aviation is estimated to be 5%.
Aviation is a small factor globally because almost nobody can afford to fly. For a typical westerner like me, a transatlantic flight per year roughly doubles my carbon footprint. Similarly, meat is a really big factor globally, because most people can afford to eat some meat, but for a westerner it makes up a much smaller (but still signifacent...) fraction of the pie because I use so much energy compared to a villager in India.
I don’t pay expensive excise taxes, passenger service fees or “security” fees when I’ve taken a train. Yet air travel is taxed to hell and back. I get it, anti-air is the cause du jour, but until there is a train from SFO to Paris that wouldn’t take 20 days, it makes no sense to tax air travel so heavily. Air travel has had the biggest impact on connecting the world than almost any other tech aside from the internet. I would be tar and feathered among a certain crowd for saying this, but I love air travel and if it causes the temperature to rise .25 degrees over the next 50 years, so be it. Airplanes represent freedom. Taxing mobility is taxing freedom itself. Take a train from Marseille to Berlin and then one might appreciate how important air travel is. It’s trendy to oppose air travel but it’s like being opposed to ocean pollution and subsequently banning toddlers from peeing in the water at the beach.
If the entire world went to nuclear power tomorrow, the climate impact of air travel wouldn’t even be a rounding error. Power generation is the biggest contributor to pollution. Airplanes are barely a few percentage points and airplanes in France have such an infinitesimal influence on world climate that the whole exercise is a joke and smacks of self-congratulatory virtue signaling more than any actual solution. Remember the politics here: the cheminots in France have extraordinary power: they can shut down the country on a whim — anything that harms air travel directly benefits one of the most powerful unions in France.
>Finally. It's really frustrating to see how heavily subsidized airlines, plane fuel and airports are and how big of a tax breaks they get when they come to a city.
I suppose the Airlines will just pass along any new taxes to the traveling consumer. I was always under the impression that airports in France were economic drivers of prosperity considering tourism makes up about 77 billion euro of economic impact to the GDP France.
Because Airlines seem to be the intended target and not the tourist. I would imagine they would have instituted an airport fee if the tourist was the target.
>The price increase thus decreasing the demand of flights, achieving the goal.
This could cause a drop in tourist dollars but maybe that's the goal. It seems Europe in general is wary of tourists. Spain has gone so far as to discourage tourism to Barcelona by restricting any new hotels or tourist accommodations. France may be following their lead and taxing Airlines instead, creating less across the whole country instead of a particular city.
That’s silly, bordering on ridiculous. The goal is to reduce emissions. That will obviously have economical consequences. Hell, that’s the whole reason we are in this mess, because doing the right thing costs more than the alternative!
Look at your last ticket. The fees being assessed are already being passed through to the end consumer. (Since they’re the one who is bringing the money into the system, they’re obviously the one who is paying it, but in this case it’s pretty transparent already.)
The economic drivers of prosperity, unfortunately, are what got us in this predicament in the first place. In the world we now live there’s no way flights should be cheaper than train tickets, should never have been.
The UK already taxes flights in a similar way.
Whilst this does feel like progress, it would be much better to tax the fuel instead of the passengers. Virtually all other fuel is taxed, so it's strange that jet fuel is exempt.
The problem with taxing passengers instead of fuel include:
- it doesn't encourage improving the efficiency of planes
- airlines can't fill their planes with really cheap seats, and empty seats seem like a ridiculous waste
- freight isn't taxed
If you tax fuel too much there's a risk that planes will fly in with enough fuel to fly out again, but that could be fixed by legislation or (better) by a standardised fuel tax across a large area.
> Virtually all other fuel is taxed, so it's strange that jet fuel is exempt.
"Without any international agreement on taxing fuel, it is highly likely that moves to impose
duty on international flights, either at a domestic or European level, would encourage
‘tankering’: carriers filling their aircraft as full as possible whenever they landed outside the
EU to avoid paying tax. Clearly this would be entirely counterproductive. Aircraft would be
travelling further than necessary to fill up in low-tax jurisdictions; in addition they would be
burning up more fuel when carrying the extra weight of a full fuel tank."
You can tax fuel burned inside european airspace instead of fuel at rest once arrived at the airport.
Also :
>EU countries can end the decades-long exemption and tax kerosene on flights between them, according to legal experts. This could either be done at EU level through a series of bilateral agreements or by agreement between individual countries, the independent legal analysis for green NGO federation Transport & Environment (T&E) finds. The old argument that foreign carriers’ operating within the EU – de facto a small number of flights – can’t be taxed can be overcome by introducing a de minimis threshold below which fuel burn would not be taxed.
That would incentivize planes to fly with as little fuel as possible. That could lead to some flights running out of fuel when unforeseen issues arise.
No matter how you tax the fuel, there are going to be some perverse incentives.
1. Tax the fuel in a plane when it leaves the airport (i.e. including the fuel the plane imports).
2. Airlines will reduce to the amount of fuel planes leaving the EU fly with to dangerously low levels.
3. ICAO prohibits planes from flying with dangerously low levels.
Point 3 entirely deals with the problem of point 2.
It is highly inefficient to make an additional landing to fuel up. The tax would have to be obscene to make the numbers work out for an airline to tanker.
Even a 20% fuel tax in the EU would probably make a few EU neighbour states lay down extra long runways so a plane can land, fuel up, and takeoff again, all without opening the doors or maneuvering/reversing. They could probably do 5 minutes with practice.
You can make it time efficient, but not fuel efficient.
As well approaching and departing procedures add to the time, so you spend at least 30min on it. Add the diversion and you lose even more time. This would make only sense for very long flights.
Refueling with passengers on board has safety considerations as well.
It's totally fuel efficient. You burn fuel coming down to land and taking off again, but you save more fuel by not having to carry the weight of fuel for your whole journey, but instead only enough fuel to get to the next stop off point.
You could make it time efficient if you designed an airport specifically for this purpose. No passenger terminal. No steps/trucks. Drive in/drive out fuel fill stations. No delay to land or landing slots (since the airport can be built in the middle of nowhere with super cheap land it needn't be runway constrained).
Some countries with high gasoline taxes situated next to countries with low gasoline taxes have anti-tankering laws for motorists (see Singapore vs Malaysia). That could be one solution.
It's illegal to tax fuel for international flights. Domestic fuel is already taxed but the Chicago Convention in 1944 set the ground rules for the ICAO and international air travel.
My naive reading is that it prohibits double taxing (taxing fuel already purchased). Are you saying that when fuel my aircraft they ask the destination so they can gauge the tax?
to the extent this is possible, this is probably the best solution, since emissions are not directly proportional to number of passengers or even fuel use.
Note also that it has only recently been established that water vapor emitted at cruising altitude has an unexpectedly long residence time and thus an unexpectedly high GWP, perhaps as much as the CO_2 emitted, thus doubling the impact over that same amount of fuel burnt at ground level.
Don’t tax actual fuel, calculate the notice fuel use based on the type of aircraft and the distance flown (so 787 is cheaper than a 747, and a flight to Cairo is less than a flight to Bangkok)
Ideally you apply this across the whole EU at the same level
Good points. Just another tax that will be passed straight down to the consumer. Wonder why no wage growth for 10+ years? Will do nothing for the enviroment. "Better not go on that holiday because of the enviroment "
>that planes will fly in with enough fuel to fly out again
Planes with fuel are too heavy to land, planes have just enough fuel to get to destination. Landing with 40% fuel capacity would break wheels and damage planes, increase stopping distance.
One flexible First class return on the exact same flight comes with Fare of £15,628 and taxes of £670. This makes one Flexible First Class ticket worth to them more than the entire capacity of Economy cabin.
Personally, I wouldn't pay that with my own cash, but if I have to fly 6+ hours for leisure, I'm paying for non-flex Business/First class seats.
They couldn't care less how empty/full is the economy cabin. At £25 per leg revenue (not profit), I'd actually be surprised if they break even.
On long haul flights, airlines probably[citation needed] operate Economy cabin at a loss.
Of course there is, there are entire airlines that only offer a single-class cabin. The whole LCC sector in Europe is based around the principle, as are Frontier and Spirit in the USA.
Now you can pay more for early-boarding or more cabin baggage or a flexi ticket but the hard product is the same.
And not really. I've never seen First/Business cabin that was more than 70% occupied. Though I'm a leisure traveller, taking roughly 3-4 return flights a year.
I am actually surprised that short-distance flights aren't taxed more in Western Europe. The train infrastructure in France is world class and can get you from Paris (North-Central part of the country) to Marseille (Southeast), a distance of about 500 miles, in 3 hours.
For Americans, this would be roughly equivalent to go from Boston to Washington D.C. (a trip that takes 7-10+ hours)
Train infrastructure in France is not premium anymore, like our health system.
Sure if you compare to North America like Canada, it is still better. I took the Via rail train in Canada last year from Toronto to Montreal, seats were spacious, good catering, but the journey was long and trains outdated. As for the price it was not crazy expensive but not cheap.
The high speed train in France (TGV) is really expensive if you cannot get any discount compared to flights. I live near Nice in France and leaving my car in the airport parking lots is often more expensive than the flights themselves, even for 3 days !
For instance a one-way flight from Lille to Nice with Easyjet (around 900km) can cost only 60 Euros, it can be 100Euros back and forth.
Also trains in France are more subject to strikes and delays. Well any mean of transportation in France is subject to strikes but the occurrence is greater with trains.
Again the French government thinks that creating a French tax will pave the road to an European one. I highly doubt so. French airports and airlines will suffer from it compared to their European equivalent, and if an European tax is created, it won't probably make the French tax disappear. France loves taxes, we see the results.
> Train infrastructure in France is not premium anymore
It still is premium compared to the average country, even if it could be far better
> The high speed train in France (TGV) is really expensive if you cannot get any discount compared to flights. I live near Nice in France
Nice is the most enclaved city in France, in the far south-east and surrounded by mountains. It is not at all representative of the rail experience you get in the other big french cities.
> Also trains in France are more subject to strikes and delays. Well any mean of transportation in France is subject to strikes but the occurrence is greater with trains.
I spend ~2000€ yearly in trains, and the cumulated delay I got in 2019 yet was 30 minutes, with 25 minutes due to a a crop fire close to the rails. Yes, delays happen, but people often overestimate them (that's my opinion).
> Again the French government thinks that creating a French tax will pave the road to an European one. I highly doubt so. French airports and airlines will suffer from it compared to their European equivalent, and if an European tax is created, it won't probably make the French tax disappear. France loves taxes, we see the results.
The 200 million € from that tax will go to make that very train system better...
The train infrastructure is not perfect, the biggest issue being travels not going to/from Paris: the lines aren't as good and there aren't a lot of high-speed lines.
I hope they wouldn't use those agressive algorithm for dynamic pricing. This is a public service, have a static pricing! This turns the train into a luxury, at times almost three times as expensive as air travel.
static pricing leads to sold out seats and poor planning by customers. It negates the ability to add capacity in advance for busy times and leads to poor efficiency overall (even completely ignoring the inconvenience of being stranded to passengers).
True, my point of view might not take everything into account, but for trains, the ability to add capacity is limited, mostly constrained by tracks leased time.
For the train I take to go back home, the price varies between 35€ and 220€. This is excessive! And not much better than sold-out seats..
You can always do the transfer via metro (and there will be at most one change). The metro isn't very well suited if you travel with a lot of luggage though.
I'm puzzled: the Lausanne-Paris arrives in _Gare de Lyon_, which is also the station where you take the train to Lyon. Then on a Lausanne-Lyon via Paris you wouldn't even need to change stations.
I have and idea of what could have happened though: maybe you took a cheaper train which doesn't arrives or leaves in Paris itself, but in a train station in suburbs (Marne la vallée, Massy Palaiseau and Roissy Charles de Gaulle).
Sorry, I meant Nantes, not Lyon. Come to think of it, I’ve never been to Lyon, not sure why I got those two cities mixed up. It wouldn’t make sense to go to Paris just to go to Lyon. :)
Aha! According to Google Maps, there are some options for making this journey today that will use the Paris Metro, but you would still have to change metro lines en route between Gare de Lyon and Gare Montparnasse (the "one change" that littlestymaar mentioned)
It's possible that these options already existed in 2006 but were complicated or inconvenient enough that no one or no web site suggested them to you.
I'm currently planning a trip where I'm considering going from Strasbourg to Toulouse. Over 7 hours on the fastest train itinerary, versus a 1.5 hour flight. Not that difficult a decision.
We can’t have nice things because people in the US live in an almost continuous band of mid-density urban agglomeration from Boston to DC, and it’s hard to reach most of the population through just a few stations.
The most noticeable thing about European cities, to my American eyes, is how they just... end. Drive from Munich airport to the city, and it’s farmland in between. Drive from Dulles to DC, and it’s strip malls and suburbs the whole way.
I noticed that on the Eurostar from Paris to London. Less than 30 minutes after leaving Gare du Nord it looked like I was in the Tennessee countryside. Except for the bend through Lille, it stayed that way until we entered the tunnel.
Baltimore and BWI together have 1.7 million NEC boarding per year, only modestly less than BBY and BOS’s combined 2.1 million. Philly has over 3 million.
Yes, it's obviously a winner for the North East. You guys can put as many cities as you like on the link list because you have the geography and the density.
The layout of the Midwest is actually more Europe-like than the Northeast, and arguably a better fit for Euro-style high speed rail. Unfortunately, the will and determination required to build it doesn't seem to exist.
I keep saying it, we need trains with sections that can detach to stop at stations (and reattach at the next passing train after leaving the station) :).
Btw, does anybody know what is the marginal energy cost of a single car added to a train running at constant speed?
As an american who's taken the day long (not high speed) trip from Boston to DC, I was amazed how fast and easy to deal with the French Rail was. I only took Paris->LeHarve and Reims >Paris routes. But wow! The subway in Paris worked pretty well too.
International flights are much cheaper in the UK than local trains. I paid the same price for a flight from Cardiff to Malta as for train from Cardiff to Bristol (40 miles).
Because of said train infrastructure I'm flying into paris, touring Europe (on trains) then flying out from berlin. Unless they can get the whole EU to agree to it it's probably going to have that affect.
We're talking about less than 20€, and only 3€ if you're flying economy. There's no way it's worth changing travel plans over that, unless for cases where it really makes no difference.
I took the train from Toulouse to Paris last summer and it was very pleasant—especially in comparison to air travel. A few hours of picturesque landscapes with plenty of legroom, baggage space, and opportunities to walk around. I think it’s too bad that we can’t seem to get that working here in the US. (See, eg, California high speed rail project...)
I love that train! I must have took it around 20 times. But by French standard, this is a terribly long one (around 6 hours).. And sometimes much more expensive that taking the one-hour flight. Hope this tax will tilt the balance.
For comparison, Paris-Marseilles is about a 1hr20 flight. Maybe comparable given airport hassle these days, but that is on what is perhaps the best route in Europe for showing what trains can do.
I doubt cost comes in to most train-flight comparisons and I'm not sure what the point of the tax would be if not to change behaviour.
You need to take into account the distance between the airport and the city center, the security checks, on-boarding, checking in, getting your luggage back... etc. It’s both time consuming and annoying.
How about Paris-Bordeaux (brand new), Paris-Strasbourg, Paris-Lille, Paris-London, Paris-Rennes ? Ok, France is very centralized but Paris-Marseille is far from being an exception.
It takes about 45 minutes to get from downtown Paris to CDG or Orly airport though, and half an hour to get from the airport in Marseille to the city center, so by the time you've figured in getting to the airport 1.5 hours before your flight, the total trip time is more like 4 hours.
I guess it depend if the train is running on electricity or diesel, but in France I had read an article in a french newspaper stating that the carbon footprint of train was 10% of the one from planes.
In France train is fine if you want to go to or from Paris, but connections between other cities have been closed or gimped with slower trains and less frequency.
It's really hypocrite of the government to shame people of flying while they've been destroying the train infrastructure all these years.
Marseille to Berlin though, not such a fun trip. Marseille to Frankfurt, multiple hours on trains, 1 hour on an airplane. Stuttgart to Barcelona? Better set aside an entire day. Biarritz to Geneva? The train system is good on certain destinations, but it’s impossible to connect everything like airplanes do.
There's nothing wrong with "flying"! What's wrong is how they get their airspeed, namely by burning fossil fuel.
Also those prices are insulting. There is no jet fuel tax in the EU. This gimmick tax is less than what people driving cars pay in taxes on their fuel for a tank of gas. Governments want to increase tax on car fuels (hence the yellow jacket movement) but still give airlines a break!
Airlines are already included in the EU cap and trade scheme. That's effectively a fuel surcharge for CO2.
(When that happened, the US disliked it so much that they passed the "European Union Emissions Trading Scheme Prohibition Act" to prohibit US carriers from complying. And China threatened to cancel airbus orders. As a result, flights that go outside of the European Economic Area are not covered by the scheme.)
For those curious, the Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation was a UN convention in 1944 that established the rules of international air travel. One of those rules deals with taxing fuel - see below.
Article 24: Aircraft flying to, from or across, the territory of a state shall be admitted temporarily free of duty. Fuel, oil, spare parts, regular equipment and aircraft stores retained on board are also exempted from customs duty, inspection fees or similar charges.
I don't really understand what the purpose of this tax is. There's no alternative to burning fuel by energy density on an airline, so why go after flights? What do they expect them to do? If you're taxing petrol cars you'd expect electric cars to become more economically viable.
Either way I disagree with carbon taxes. They're regressive, and ignore the fact that regular people are being badly hurt by them whereas the rich won't even feel it.
The purpose of the tax is to recover the external cost of flying.
Ideally there are alternatives to flying, but it's not a requirement: as long as flying has an environmental price, recovering it through tax is a decent logic.
We can discuss the offered price, or how the tax could be structured, but I don't think the approach is unreasonable on its face.
But close to nothing is being recovered. We would recover more or less the same if we introduced a tax on bad weather to be paid by those suffering from it.
The money collected with this tax may or may not reduce air travel and will be spent on government employees, welfare distributions, healthcare, roads, military etc as all other taxes and only a fraction will be spent on improving the environment.
They could destroy the money collected from the tax and it would still improve the environment: the tax will discourage people from flying and encourage people to use alternatives, which helps the environment.
All of this has been studied and modeled extensively. It's called elasticity of demand. The fact that professional trading firms are selling airline stock, pushing the price down, shows you that yes, this will indeed have an effect.
It should be less about generating revenue and more about preventing a loophole. The loophole is that it's possible for one party to make a profit at the expense of everyone else. That means there's an incentive / reward for destructive behavior.
IMHO, though, the tax should be just enough to neutralize that incentive. Anything more and you are selectively penalizing one industry, which I don't think is fair. Airlines didn't invent the concept of burning fuel to power machinery; society did, chose it as the basis for all industrial technology, and used it for everything. Air travel is just one thing on that list.
Also, the airlines were not the only ones who benefited. More or less, we all did. If ticket prices always included the carbon cost, then your business would have had to pay a higher price to fly you to that business meeting. And you would have had to pay a higher price to go on that vacation or visit those relatives.
We all had a party and trashed the place. We should all clean it up together.
So far that reason, to the extent that we can fix things with government action (funding research, etc.), I think the costs should be taken that out of the general fund. That not only everyone pays for what everyone benefited from, it also means it can be progressive and have other attributes of good tax policy.
"But close to nothing is being recovered. We would recover more or less the same if we introduced a tax on bad weather to be paid by those suffering from it."
This is a good point, actually ...
If the tax is punitive enough that it results in a meaningful decrease in miles flown then it has a positive environmental impact, but it's difficult to imagine the taxes being that punitive. That's probably politically impossible.
In order for this to "recover" something, as is being discussed, you'd need a way to convert these dollars into carbon sinks of some kind - which isn't, itself, without controversy ...
I am personally in favor of removing subsidies to air travel and increasing taxes on miles flown such that the impact would be noticeable, but again, that's a tall order, politically.
It’s a bit tricky but as I far as I know France gov can’t by design reserve the profit from any tax to a specific use. It’s all pooled for the global budget, and the pooled money is dispatched according to the agreed plan each year.
But any new project requiring significant financement needs to propose actions to balance its cost to get approved, thus in this instance the project to invest in roads and rails is backed by this tax.
The projected tax amount just needs to be roughly the same as the new project’s cost.
Also, expect more European countries to follow. The Dutch government is intent on doing this too; either on their own, or (preferably) on a European scale.
How does it being EU-wide help KLM/AirFrance? It's not like people is going to take flights out of London or Berlin instead of Paris or Amsterdam to avoid the tax.
Or maybe you mean that if it's only NL and France it will just bankrupt KLM/AirFrance while it is's EU-wide it will bankrupt them all.
Carbon taxes are the most efficient way to let the market work out technical solutions to the climate crisis. Period.
If you're worried about regressive taxation, check out the fee-and-dividend model, where all revenue is returned to households [0]. This means that for most "regular" people, the carbon tax is actually a tax credit – because most of the pollution is caused by the excessive consumption by rich households.
There is actually a bill before the House now that has a non-zero chance of passing.
I'd argue it's a bit of both -- it's a sin tax, and a pigovian tax. Sin taxes _are_ meant to cut down on use, while pigovian taxes aren't meant to cut down on use, rather, make up for external damage (such as to the environment).
I suppose a better definition would be that sin taxes are meant to cut down on personal use, while pigovian are meant to offset external factors which the use of the product/service causes. Of course, each of these taxes are going to end up cutting down use, as it would lower demand due to a higher cost, but the idea is that a pigovian tax is successful even if the use doesn't go down significantly, as the tax proceeds would be reinvested in offsets from the negative activity. A sin tax could do this, but it doesn't always do this.
"but the idea is that a pigovian tax is successful even if the use doesn't go down significantly"
That's why I said its political. If you're pro $TAX you say its pigovian and even if it doesn't 'work' you can claim its not supposed to. Whereas if you're anti $TAX, or want to appear tough on X, you say its a sin tax.
I suppose you could argue a pigovian tax would have an upper bound, whereas a sin tax isnt bounded by anything, but for the types of things either label is used for, the externalities are so far removed and open to interpretation that you could still argue whether $TAX more than offsets/comes nowhere near offsetting X.
Long story short, I don't think you could say definitively whether a tax is sin or pigovian.
At least for flights around Europe, taking the train. Flight in Europe are very cheap. It's actually cheaper to fly from London to Newcastle than it is to get the train, and it takes roughly the same time.
For all flights the alternative is just not to go. Instead of flying to the Caribbean for a holiday, go some place closer and take the train, instead of flying for a business meeting, just call in. If it's worth that much for you to fly, then paying a little tax on top should be fine. Flyers still aren't paying fully for the damage they do to the environment.
As much as I worry about global warming, this antagonizing view doesn't help
"Paying for the damage" is this some kind of joke? What about all the other polluters? Shipping? Coal plants?
Macron got the Yellow Jackets by hating on people that depend on cars to do their job, because wow, if you don't live in a place with public transport and already pay a substantial amount of tax in everything else and earn less than the people in the capital you should pay more right? You're the bad guys
Wow pat yourself in the back for not taking a straw and taxing those "big bad" travelers. Then wonder why your tax revenue goes down every year or people hate you.
"Oh but sleeper trains" yeah, also known for the constant robberies and lawlessness inside them.
> because wow, if you don't live in a place with public transport and already pay a substantial amount of tax in everything else and earn less than the people in the capital you should pay more right? You're the bad guys
Damned if you do, damned if you don't, there is no nice way out of our unsustainable lifestyles, we're all going to take a blow.
> What about all the other polluters? Shipping? Coal plants?
We have 4 coal plants in france and they're about to close. As far as I know most industries pay taxes for pollution (carbon tax, eco tax, &c.)
> "Paying for the damage" is this some kind of joke? What about all the other polluters? Shipping? Coal plants?
Right – tax them too, and distribute the revenue back to households. That way it's not a regressive tax, but a wealth transfer from heavy polluters to regular folks who are bearing the indirect costs of the climate crisis.
This sounds like a better plan, too bad it won't happen
This tax will just go to cover deficit or to pay the exceptional privileges of the government employees including French railways which go on strike more often than not.
But surely, alienating the common people is the way to go...
I don't know about France, but this model is now reality in (at least part of) Canada, and the US has a bill before the House [0]. It's the only politically viable way of implementing carbon pricing.
> This tax will just go to cover deficit or to pay the exceptional privileges of the government employees
"just", well france is the definition of a welfare state so if it "just" helps cover the deficit mostly caused by our social security system it's already quite good.
Let's not fool anyone here, europe is plagued with low cost airline companies, the vast majority of flights are for leisure. The alternative to slowly destroying the world for leisure related flights is to not travel.
I can buy TWO berlin<>mallorca round trips for the same price as a single taxi trip from berlin to the airport.
When was the last time you had no choice but to fly from Paris to New York?
Not taking the flight at all can also be an option. If you really need to, well contributing 18 euros to support less polluting infrastructure such as trains is not that big a price to pay.
The beachfront Arizona joke is usually not about rising sea levels but rather about earthquakes in California causing that state to break off from the continent.
It's a line from an old country song and it's a joke about the fact that AZ has no coastline.
Usually it's used to imply something is obviously false and impossible. While there is no song about a train from NYC to Paris the similarity should be obvious.
Sounds rather wonderful to travel across the oceans in a luxury airship. Perhaps throw in the excitement of a murder mystery solved by a cunning Belgian detective with a funny moustache as well?
I took a plane from Lisbon to Paris for 35 euros last week. That feels incredibly cheap to me, especially compared to high-speed train. I routinely pay twice as much to get not even half as far by TGV. Making train more competitive by taxing planes more might not be a terrible idea. I say might because I can't pretend to even begin to understand all the implications of this tax but hopefully whoever came up with it did...
On distances like Lisbom to Paris trains can't compete on time, not only on price. There is no way a train can be made faster with the current technology (hyperloop: let's wait and see.) I think nobody goes from Lisbon to Paris and back by train to spend a weekend there.
Of course if flying costs more people will fly less.
Hopefully if planes become more expensive we'll see some investments in the train infrastructure. Going from Lisbon to Paris even without changes will probably still take a long time even with a bullet train but if I can schedule a trip by night and sleep reasonably comfortably I think I'd consider it over the plane.
Catching a train in the late afternoon in the center of Lisbon, working for a few hours, sleeping and waking up in the center of Paris sounds fairly pleasant to me. Of course at the moment that's effectively science fiction.
A pittance of a tax won't reduce carbon emissions. Depending on where it goes, it might maybe make other means of transportation a bit nicer.
To actively reduce carbon emissions, you'd have to actually make the cost of a short flight much more expensive.
Also, since not all flights can be replaced with lower emission travels (long, intercontinental flights), you'd have to tax them out to the point that people simply stop coming to Europe.
You might maybe get a half of a percentage of global CO2 emissions cut that way. Maybe. In either case, the current growth rate of emissions far eclipses that, so it is at best virtue signalling. At worst, you are punishing poor people for being too poor to afford the high rates, while at the same time bringing in less tax revenue because only a few rich people are flying.
Sorry yes. The article says 18 euros is the cap for business international, not the starting point. This is still very small potatoes when a business class ticket isn’t going for less than $3k.
Interesting that they are also not taxing transits, meaning if you just transfer through CDG, you aren’t paying the tax.
And a 3 euro flat tax for economy is small potatoes too.
The original argument was that this would really hurt the poor. My counterargument was that flying is still a luxury, and the poor do not fly or fly frequently enough where this would actually be devastating to them.
If anything the tax is too small to change anyone's behavior.
They're probably trying to make sure they don't charge so much that flying out of France becomes more expensive than some nearby city in a bordering country. But even so, these taxes are very, very low. Honestly, I wouldn't mind paying 10 Euros on a flight if I knew it was helping rail systems. It's cheaper than the stupid "convenience fee" that I have to pay for concert tickets.
I wonder: does Ticketmaster not make any profit at all on the ticket sale itself (does all that go to the act), and is the "convenience fee" actually their profit? Or is there profit built into the ticket price itself, and the convenience fee just additional profit?
If it's the former, it's still lousy because they're advertising lower prices than what the actual cost is.
But even so, it's still not much different from retail stores charging sales tax. Personally, I think it should be illegal to charge sales tax after-the-fact. The price advertised should be the price you pay, period. In Europe, this is exactly how it is: whatever price you see advertised is what you pay, and that's all. There's taxes (15% VAT I think, so not trivial), but they're built into the price, and they're not allowed to advertise the pre-tax price. This is exactly how it should be.
The convenience fee is backdoor extra money for the event provider (eg band), they split the money with ticket master. Ticket master plays the bad guy (everyone can hate them since they are a monopoly) so the band doesn’t look evil themselves.
Convenience fees are basically dark business method patterns.
And by taxing carbon, you get the added benefit of reducing some other tax, like the regressive nature of income taxes (ie: taxing people that have to work because they didn’t inherit/afford capital assets)
A general carbon tax should absolutely be paired with a dividend of some kind to offset its effect on the poor.
However consumption patterns by everyone needs to change en masse, and a carbon tax across the board is a no-brainer to adjust individual incentives to achieve this.
Except that trains don't have the same possible destinations, you can't (easily) take a train to a destination outside EU. I think the gov went in the wrong direction here, the tax for flights within France should have been the highest, to give more incentives for using the train
That's OK. Nobody is forcing you to take the train, you're just being expected to pay for the environmental costs of your decision to fly, should you choose to do so.
> I do not know of a commercial airport without a train station.
I went to a business trip from AMS (Schiphol) to WRO (Wroclaw). Wroclaw airport does not have any rail station (the nearest is a kilometer away). We had to take the shuttle bus to the train station in Wroclaw city centre.
The train from AMS would probably have taken over a day. Excluding check-in and luggage drop-off, flying took less than two hours.
There’s nothing inherent to carbon taxes that need to be regressive. E.g., you can provide a dividend or set of benefits from the funds that disproportionately favors the poor.
But not taxing carbon is also “regressive”, in that climate change will disproportionately hurt the world’s poorest.
Firstly, it depends what is done with the proceeds. A fee and dividend system that redistributes the proceeds among all citizens can be made as progressive as you want, depending on the policy for sizing everyone's dividend.
Second,even if the dividend is an equal dollar amount for every citizen, the average person is made more than whole bythe dividend, while most wealthy individuals who have larger homes,engage in more air travel, buy new cars more frequently, etc will fund a disproportionately large fraction of the proceeds.
Seems pretty clear to me? Flying is bad for the environment, spectacularly so. The alternative is not necessarily: flying without burning fuel. But rather: not flying.
And that isn't that big of a problem. We have many alternatives to flying, e.g. a high-speed rail system that has a 10x smaller impact. Of course you want to steer consumers towards that with incentives like these.
Earnings from these taxes don't just disappear in a black hole. They're redistributed. Perhaps to make train travel cheaper and more economically viable. Perhaps electric cars. Given the socioeconomic groups that most frequently use public transport vs air travel, this tax seems progressive, not regressive, if anything.
And that's only one alternative to flying: other forms of travel. Another is simply not travelling at all. There's a reason people don't choose to live 20 hours away from work, or choose to have a daily hobby in another country, or choose to visit friends across the world on a daily basis, because there's a cost to travel. A cost that is too high. And that's okay. Not all travel has to happen, not all travel is important enough to pay the cost.
May seem silly, but if we could teleport around the world for $1, with hypothetically insane costs to the environment, you'd have massive amounts of unnecessary travel. And the right response would be as a society that we could do without much of this unnecessary travel entirely, replace it with viable alternatives to proximity like a phonecall, a skype call, a text message, a picture etc. And we can do this by making it more expensive, and using that money to make low-impact alternatives (relatively) cheaper.
If you know that as a society we're destroying our environment and the current cost of doing so is too cheap, or the destruction is not factored in to the price, the most reasonable solution is to increase the cost.
> They're regressive, and ignore the fact that regular people are being badly hurt by them whereas the rich won't even feel it.
how many people actually need to fly outside of traveling for work? in America, a high tax on gasoline would actually be devastating to the livelihood of a lot of poor citizens. being priced out of frequent air travel doesn't sound like a massive hardship.
I am in Europe. Travel between Porto and Faro (Portugal) by train is 5 hours versus 50 minutes by plane (ok, plus one for security) and 2-5 times as expensive.
During the last 2 years I was doing this flight pretty much twice a week. It was the only way I could spend time with my kid, but still keep my job and work to support him.
I also travel for work longer distances (NY, San Francisco and all over Europe) once or twice a month (which I try to match with my trips to see my son).
Lets instead tax all the iPhone Xr and Pixel whatevers. Laptops as well. They all contribute to the shitty environment (rare materials, plastics, shipping, polluting assembling them).
This is the problem I see with pretty much every cause.
> I don't see why X or Y is needed (because I don't needed it), so everyone else is selfish and ruining the environment, but what they think is essential (new shiny gadgets, brand clothes done by kids in Asia, etc) are always forgotten.
first of all, no one is talking about banning air travel or anything like that. the tax being discussed is only 1.5 euros for non-business class flights within the EU. this doesn't actually come close to offsetting the CO2 produced by you flying from Porto to Faro one way (according to this calculator [0]).
you have a special case with your son, but most people don't need to fly outside of work. if you can already afford to fly twice a week, my guess is you can also afford another twelve euros per month to offset a fraction of the damage. if your employer really needs you to travel, I'm sure they will find a way to come up with an extra eighteen euros.
> I don't see why X or Y is needed (because I don't needed it), so everyone else is selfish and ruining the environment, but what they think is essential (new shiny gadgets, brand clothes done by kids in Asia, etc) are always forgotten.
I do agree with you here. what we need is a fair taxation scheme to offset all environmental damage. just make a list: how much does it cost to undo the damage of one flight, one ipad, etc. then you let people buy what they want, but make them pay to fix the environmental damage. when the price reflects the true cost, people will figure out what they actually need and budget accordingly. there will be some things (cars in rural areas are an obvious example) where it will simply be too damaging to the poor to fully tax immediately, but most people will find that there's a lot of stuff they can reduce their consumption of.
I'm ok with taxing flights if we also tax pretty much everything else for the environmental externalities of it. My problem is when countries/politicians/ordinary people choose one or two items that don't fully affect them and try to lecture others about it. (not saying it is your case, just in general).
And for my case, it is about 4 flights a week (both ways * 2). It may not be much, but is an extra 25 euros per month. Will this make me stop flying? Not really, but I will be pretty sour about it so I don't see how it offsets anything (but to be fair, us Europeans are already used to be heavily taxed in pretty much everything, and while I won't really feel the cost of the 25 euros, others will, see yellow jackets and the gas tax). And I pay for my work flights since I work for myself ;)
For you to get an idea, I just checked flights for September and I can do a return flight for 36.97 euros and will take me 50 minutes (+ airport time, which is about 1 hour for me). Same trip by train is 5h50 and costs 64 euros (on promotion, regular price is 105 euros.
ps: I hate flying and travelling. I do it because I need to.
> Will this make me stop flying? Not really, but I will be pretty sour about it so I don't see how it offsets anything
Someone else who flies just as much as you and could make an effort not to will also feel sour about it and maybe make an effort to change the situation. Maybe that person can save up and buy a home someplace else, or wake up earlier to take the train to wherever that person is going.
The problem is we are not talking about choosing between a car and public transportation where the time difference will be an extra 10 or so minutes. We are talking time differences between 1 hour and 5 hours, or between 4 hours and days. No one will really stop flying unless you tax it 200 euros per flight or something.
I just see this as the French government adding an extra tax to deal with their own budget issues. (which is ok, but lets call it that, and not an offset or 'incentive' tax, like it will actually change anything for the environment)
> Travel between Porto and Faro (Portugal) by train is 5 hours versus 50 minutes by plane
That's exactly the problem: Porto to Faro for should have a better train connectivity, that will emit 10x less CO2, should take not more than 3 hours and should be much cheaper than taking a plane.
Carbon taxes are not inherently regressive, that's simply false. What do you DO with the taxes, that's what makes them progressive or regressive. If you rebate the taxes to the people, they become PROgressive, as the rich are much more likely to have higher carbon footprints.
Even if you account for the security issues, I never had a plane in Europe being quicker than the plane (with all the overhead). In most cases is double or triple the time (for shorter distances) or close to impossible for longer ones.
1) You have to appear at least 1.5 hour before departure (luggage drop, security checks)
2) You have to drive to an airport and back, might take hours in some cases unless you live close enough (in a big city), but it will usually take not less than 30-50 mins one way
3) It takes up to 30 minutes to get luggage after landing
Rail:
a) Train stations are in the centers of cities; max 10-15 mins by subway or bus/tram; high-speed trains also stop in many mid-size cities/towns
You can have a kickback, like Canada. Basically, you pay the carbon tax as a middle class person and then you get a decent amount of money back from the government to cover the damages, and everyone gets up to the same amount (which is like a thousand bucks or something). So, it becomes no biggy for a middle class family who took one flight during the past three years, but a celebrity who flies around with his private jet multiple times a week will feel the pinch.
I don't believe there is technology even on the horizon which would make this remotely feasible. The best of electric aircraft at the moment can fly for 90 minutes carrying two people; allegedly aimed at the flight training market. Except that gives it about enough endurance for a single lesson and it'd then need to be recharged for 3-4 hours before it could fly again. Compare this to a Rotax powered trainer which burns ~15 litres of fuel an hour and can be refuelled in 5 minutes.
You are correct. There are people working on this, but the best estimates I've seen are that hybrid-electric airliners are ~30-40 years from commercialization and fully electric simply isn't feasible without a fundamental breakthrough in the battery energy-density space.
Even hybrids only make sense to me in the context of aircraft having the ability to taxi using electric motors, only starting their engines at the holding point (turbine engines burn a significant amount of fuel even at idle). I believe Airbus have a patent on this idea.
Otherwise turbine engines are run close to their designed maximum continuous thrust for the majority of a flight. It's not like a car where they only need ~20% of their maximum power in cruise.
I'm not an aerospace engineer, so I can only repeat what I've seen in presentations. (I'm a software engineer at an aerospace research organization.)
One specific area that I recall being investigated is the ability to decouple power and thrust. That is, convert some of the power generated by the existing turbines into electricity and use that to drive an electric fan in (a) non-traditional location(s). This can have complex aerodynamic interactions that I don't really understand in detail, but the take-away is that it can reduce drag and thus overall energy required for a given flight.
You don't need to fly in western Europe, and anyway the charge increases for more expensive classes.
I'm not even sure that carbon taxes overall are regressive. Can't afford a car? Your transport is lower carbon. Drive a small car because you cant afford a large one? Your transport is lower carbon. Cant afford air con, cant afford heating, a new phone every year...
Yes there are edge cases, not being able to afford insulation, an energy efficient fridge or car or whatever but I would guess your average poor person has a lower carbon footprint than your average rich person.
They say it will "help support the environment", which could mean through funding of greener initiatives, R&D or level the playing field (although the tax is really low/symbolic, in my opinion).
It makes sense to tax flights in order to subsidize rail for short-distance trips. I would have expected a higher tax on flights outside the EU, so that people change their habits (although then you need a carbon-tax sort of scheme, not to penalize low-income people who visit their family once a year).
Related: I was surprised to learn recently that short-distance trips by plane actually have lower CO2-emissions than long-distance ones, because the plane does not need to carry so much fuel just for later use.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/apr/06/aviation... also states "short flights tend to be more harmful to the climate per mile travelled than long-haul flights are (because they have more empty seats, and because taking off and landing burns more fuel than cruising)".
Thanks, it is indeed a bit more complicated than I first thought! There is a sweet spot: "Above a certain distance it becomes more fuel-efficient to make a halfway stop to refuel, despite the energy losses in descent and climb." [0]
Interesting tidbit (from the same): Very long non-stop passenger flights suffer from the weight penalty of the extra fuel required, which means limiting the number of available seats to compensate. For such flights, the critical fiscal factor is the quantity of fuel burnt per seat-nautical mile. For these reasons the world's longest commercial flights were cancelled c. 2013. An example is Singapore Airlines' former New York to Singapore flight, which could carry only 100 passengers (all business class) on the 10,300-mile (16,600 km) flight. According to an industry analyst, "It [was] pretty much a fuel tanker in the air."
People with also tell you that take-off burns most of the fuel. I think I read that the sweet-spot in terms of miles per unit fuel is about four hours. (Freight seems to go in roughly four-hour hops, I believe partly for that reason).
I asked the other day [1] if electric towplanes might help with takeoff. I have no idea what the answer would be, but it seems like an interesting use-case to me: short distance, high intensity/power. Build a battery with wings and thrusters.
Of course, it comes with its share of drawbacks as well. But if it was to allow lighter planes, and less fuel expenses/burnt, it could well be worth it.
As subsidies and taxes can be used to incentivize and disincentivize behavior, I’m happy about this. Flights have truly large ecologic costs, and flyers need to be aware of that, trying to minimize travel if not necessary. I’m particularly happy that it’s not a flat tax but based on ticket class.
Can't tell if you're trolling. The A320 weights 42,600 kg. A passenger weights 100kg, let's say 150kg with luggages. That's 0.3% if the overall mass of the plane. Wouldn't make much of a difference if you have an extra 50kg.
I think the gov went in the wrong direction here, the tax for flights within France should have been the highest, to give more incentives for using the train, which is quite good (and very good when travelling to/from Paris).
> Want to do something about climate change? Start with yourself
I really dislike this line of thinking. I don’t manufacture millions of tons of concrete or millions of single-use plastic shampoo bottles. Our current path is irreversible if drastic shifts in disposable consumerism don’t occur soon.
There's a constant war of words here: are individuals responsible for cleaning up their footprint, or are corporations responsible for their dirty practices, or are governments responsible for putting policies to guide the economy?
The answer is: we need all three. We will not tackle climate change without strong change on the personal, corporate, and governmental levels.
I agree with need all tree. However someone needs to go first and that is government. They need to level the playing field so no corporation can gain an advantage of abusing externalities and educate the population.
We have business leaders in the US claiming for more tax. At the same time we have 3rd world countries shipping trash back to the 1st world.
Governments could and should be doing more to price externalities and force innovation.
We do indeed, but the leverage lies with and so the emphasis should be on the governmental. I have changed my lifestyle markedly since I had my own personal revelation around climate. I don't use that to go on a holy crusade to convert, I don't even mention it unless a discussion goes there and asks. That's so I can live with myself, and look the kids, who will have to endure the consequences, in the eye. Companies engage in far more greenwashing, lobbying and distraction than real efforts, eco brands somewhat excepted.
I cannot change labelling law to require impacts (emissions, habitat, sustainable) clearly shown to allow me to buy with wisdom. I can only guess. I am certain, despite having above average interest, I often guess wrong. I can't bring a carbon tax, packaging levy, delist companies that don't play along, or creatively rewrite corporate law to place survival as important as profit, or change international trade law.
One new oil rig, chemical plant or drilling field can easily cancel the individual efforts of an entire city, perhaps country.
So I tend to see it as government first last and everything; corporate at gun ^W legislation point, and individual as a matter of personal ethics and social acceptance. Despite having started with me - as far as I'm reasonably able.
Governments and Corporations will never do anything without strong demand from individuals. Individuals however are completely unable to solve climate change through daily personal decisions, it has to come from large institutions.
All in all, the only way to address the issue of climate change is collective mass action, including strikes, boycotts, divestments, ect from all large polluting entities, while simultaneously leaving governments no other options but to address these issues head on.
Yes, with the caveat that it must be a large enough tax to make it cheaper to use cleaner energy sources. Otherwise it will go the way of regulatory fines: they become the cost of doing business and amount to a fixed line item on a budget rather than a factor that scales.
Change happens at the margins. NASCAR for example is unlikely to care about even rather extreme carbon taxes, but even fairly small tiny taxes matter for electricity generation which is at a major tipping point.
Corporations dictate consumer behavior in the ways that matter here. Do you think individuals agitated for the rise of throw-away goods during the rise of mass produced plastics in the 60s? This was the simply the most companies could do in the production process to maximize profit in a way that wouldn't stop customers from buying.
Also, nothing will change until people stop imagining that corporations and government are foreign bodies comprised of something other than their neighbors and themselves.
It is weird how people pretend that corporations and governments are some type of weird entities with minds of their own instead of just a group of individuals. Individuals changing priorities will directly result in corporations and governments changing priorities.
But the inverse is also strongly true. It's why people decry the "nanny-state". The government and corporations can make decisions that result in changes in individual behavior. Many times, it's easier to get 51 senators (or whatever) to agree on pushing policy than mobilizing millions of consumers on the same issue. Part of the advantage of a representative government is that it's a smaller group of people to arrive at a consensus.
Societal changes are always about some group reaching a consensus on a topic and collectively acting on their decision. Governments and Corporations can sometimes be easier to deal with than 300+ million individuals when it comes to driving that consensus.
> if drastic shifts in disposable consumerism don’t occur soon.
Now the question is how to achieve the drastic shift. The popular opinion is that we need to vote in the right politicians and the change should come from the top. I used to think this way for a long time. I've changed my opinion recently. Think about any significant societal change in the last century or so. Women suffrage, civil rights movement, anti-war movement, gay rights. None of these changes have come from the top. None were initiated by the parliament. They all started as a popular rebellion, direct action and civil disobedience.
Completely agree. To that I add catastrophes, because most environmental acts (e.g. the air pollution control act in the USA or the watershed act in the UK, both in the 50s) came about in part because of previous environmental disasters or dangers we were not careful enough to prevent, and only after tragic incidents did the politicians decide they had to push for these types of acts.
The other tool we have in our toolbox nowadays is consumerism. We can choose what to buy, so if there are alternatives that are more environmentally friendly and that are gaining momentum because of our shifting ethical and moral values, every other opportunist will want to, at the very least, not miss out on an opportunity. This is why I support extinction rebellion even though I find them quite annoying. It brings an issue into the mainstream conversation which will hopefully change our attitudes towards excessive consumerism.
Another point I find relevant is all your examples involved a non-trivial (possibly overwhelming for this crowd) use of violence (which I think you somewhat understated as civil disobedience).
So... do we have the stamina to ramp up our "protest" into something mildly violent?
civil disobedience is by definition non-violent. Unless by non-trivial violence you mean the violence against the protesters (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Riders)
Desegregation & civil rights was by no means non-violent. Gay Rights was by no means non-violent- in fact, one of the penultimate moments of the gay movements was the stonewall riots, a series of violent acts against the police that are still ceberated to this day within the community. (Not that I'm arguing they are unjustified in their behavior- but there's nothing peaceful about throwing a brick- and most importantly, that brick thrown has practically been enshrined into LGBTQ mythology.)
Arguing that violence is never the answer and pointing to movements that had violent elements that then are regarded as successfully rising up against oppressive systems is nonsensical.
"No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible" ~ Stanisław Jerzy Lec
Sure, you won't be able to make a measurable impact by yourself. However your mindset quickly leads to a tragedy of the commons type response that leaves us all in trouble. We should all take a more proactive approach to this in both our private life and in our professional work.
This is an excellent analogy given that snowflakes don't exactly have any agency over whether they end up in an avalanche, and removing individual snowflakes from a mountain won't an avalanche stop.
> removing individual snowflakes from a mountain won't an avalanche stop.
That is exactly the point of the analogy. One single snowflake doesn't prevent the avalanche and therefore one single snowflake is not to blame. However if enough snowflakes are removed the avalanche is stopped. Similarly no single person is going to fix climate change. The only way we see results is if enough people band together to make changes.
And historically the best way for people to band together to collectively do the same thing is via government action. Far more important to do activism and press the government to solve it than to inconvenience yourself and think "Well, I did my part, now everyone should do the same".
That's clearly true. Otherwise, why would the fossil fuel and related industries be spending so much money fighting any attempts to put a price on carbon or otherwise regulate it?
I agree. We need regulations to change and that includes both taxes and subsidies which are the main topics of the article and the top comment respectively. But in order to change those things, we need political will and that political will comes from self discipline.
Any regulation on corporate behavior is ultimately just a proxy for regulation on individuals (because it's often easier to regulate corporations, as they tend to be more accountable). Corporations will discipline themselves if the demand for their product goes away.
Tragedy of the commons is caused by regulation. That's how you get commons in the first place—resources that everyone is allowed to use but no one has any investment in. It's solved by allowing the commons to be homesteaded and converted to private ownership.
But it is us who are actually performing the "consumerism". It is us who buys tons of garbage and then throw it out. It is us who continue to buy gas guzzlers and wanting to live grossly inefficient lifestyles via living in suburbia, combined with us voting against mass transit.
It is also us who vote in people who do not care about climate change.
Ultimately, we are the ones who are willingly giving money to these companies. We simply don't seem to care on a grand scale because there continues to be high demand for inefficient goods. We are voting with our dollars.
I agree, I think a carbon tax that puts a price on the damage people do day to day with their behavior is the only thing that’s going to work on a meaningful scale. The needed changes are too painful to make without pushing hard on peoples’ wallets.
Carbon taxes end up being a regressive tax on the poor (not entirely, but marginally), especially given that poorer folks are often forced to commute longer distances and live in less well insulated and modernized homes.
An approach that focuses on decreasing the price of clean technology, rather than one that just raises the price of dirtier tech and assumes later rebalancing would be a much more effective approach, with possibly still having carbon taxes for corporations, but not individuals.
Certainly. Wealthier people may be more likely than the poor to drive Teslas instead of smoke-belching old bangers, but they also tend to fly more, heat and air-condition their huge houses, use many more gadgets and appliances that generate CO2 during both manufacture and use, etc.
It's like this on most issues on HN. Some of them benefit from a larger following (Animal cruelty, politics in your community), while others will simply be useless without government involvement to shut down the offenders. The only thing an individual is really accomplishing by avoiding flights in most cases is inconveniencing themselves and assuaging their conscious. Change needs to come from the top here, or nothing meaningful will get done.
You're right, but the more people are able to make good choices, the more politicians will be able to put pressure on companies who make money on carbon emissions. Politicians can't do anything unless consumers really show they're able to change.
Climate change is a problem of consumption and how economies are completely dependent on carbon emissions. You just cannot realistically forbid this and this without hurting the economy and its existing carbon-dependent infrastructure. Climate change will be fought on campaigning on consumers so that they call on their good will and shift markets.
I guess the only reliable way to make consumers change their choice is fear mongering about climate change. We need more climate change hard-scifi.
If consumers act like lazy sedentary irresponsible kids, the only way will be to instate hard measures: banning personal cars and adding more organized public transport, switching to reusable glass and steel packaging, reducing bullshit jobs to avoid useless transportation, economies of scale to avoid emissions, a big nuclear energy plan, etc. To be honest all those things should already be startups. They're not complicated. It's a matter of law and how salesmen are pushing consumers to make bad choices.
I've done no research on the company but I assume Graham is profiting off of its success. Since only collective action will solve climate change's effects on the middle and lower classes this is just cynical profiteering off of global disasters.
There's two things to this. Yes, we shouldn't be buying shampoo in the disposable plastic containers - but corporations shouldn't be able to manufacture them in the first place.
Here in Denver there is a shop where I can buy a reusable glass bottle that they will refill for me when I bring it back to buy more (soap, shampoo, detergent, etc). Perhaps supermarkets could transition to this model for everything.
Yes a nice strong plastic bottle of shampoo that you keep. Wont have branding however or whatever the packaging is supposed to convey for this brand. It will be your own choice of color or look.
Here are the ways I see airline industry produces pollution:
* The airports are built (clearing so much green land, using so much concrete)
* How flights taxi when on airport
* How much time they spend in air due to congestion or weather
* How far airports are located from city population centers and transportation between them.
* Amount of time people spend at airports waiting - hence need large facilities to host them with food, entertainment (shopping) etc with air-conditioning.
I can imagine ways of switching over to alternate fuels, optimizing the process flows to reduce fuel needed or avoid certain step entirely through innovation and drastic changes.
But huge segment of travel generated pollution can be completed avoided by replacing in-person business meetings with alternate equally rich and rewarding experiences.
In the future, some day, I hope there will be holographic rooms that one can use to holographically teleport to another location and do meetings as if they are there in person. This would consume way less energy and hence reduce pollution. Imagine "holo-portation" hotel rooms that you can rent for doing meetings.
> I hope there will be holographic rooms that one can use to holographically teleport to another location and do meetings as if they are there in person.
HP took strides on this in 2007 with the "Halo Room".
It's surprising the government didn't start with that instead of abruptly raising gas prices. Both are eco-friendly moves, but this one targets the rich more than the poor. Maybe it would have prevented months-long Yellow Vest protests.
I'm getting to the point where I think 'tax incidence analysis' should be a required course, perhaps required every few years throughout ones life just to ensure it's not forgotten[0]. It would improve the political discourse substantially.
[0] Actual implementation of this would be very difficult on many axes and perhaps impossible without introducing more problem than it solves, but I think it's worth it to try to figure out.
I wonder if this will roil the working masses like the planned gas taxes did. Maybe it will take a while until the work stoppages and lay offs kick in.
Would lighter planes mean less pollution? Shouldn't we look at per-customer emissions? There's clearly benefit to a 2 seater vs 1 seater, what about 30 seats vs 60 seats? I don't actually know the physics here, would be interesting to see that calculated.
Every kg of CO2 you contribute to pushing out in the atmosphere is a little bit of freedom taken away from the generations coming after you that will have to deal with the consequences.
If airplane flights are inappropriately priced compared to the externalities they cause - which I’d argue is the case, as with any industry powered by fossil fuel - then taxes are a great way to deal with that.
The reactions in this thread really show why I'll never want to become a politicians. Half of the reactions here are "that's a regressive tax that'll kill our freedom", the other half being "that's not nearly expensive enough".
We may be at the point where we have to choose between the freedom to fly and the freedom to live on an inhabitable planet.
Generations from now, people will, if there are any left, look back on these bourgeois luxuries as a kind of grotesque oppulance, utterly out of whack with ecological reality.
The fact that airplane fuel wasn't as heavily taxed as gas was actually one of the arguments of the gilets jaunes. "We're poor and we can't buy gas to go to work, meanwhile rich people fly to the Caribbeans with subsidized fuel."
Keep in mind that, AFAIK, traveling by plane is significantly more mainstream in the USA (probably due to the huge distances and lack of viable alternatives) than it is in Europe and specifically in France.
The protest that originated "gilets jaunes" was because the increase in gasoline price would affect low wage workers for which their car was one of the main tools for their job.
I cannot imagine many low wage workers that depend on international flights to take home some bread...
I think Yellow Jackets won't mind so much because they are defending the poor people, against raising fuel price just to save 0.001 degree in 100 years.
I don't think they will perceive this as hitting the population they defend.
French government, unlike German one, is a lot smarter, and didn't kill its nuclear industry, adding more coal burning emissions. Surely this will pay in the long term. And a lot.
There are indeed a lot of things that were "normal" just a few years back: driving without seat belts, smoking in clubs, having sex with strangers without condoms, eating things that are now restricted due to environmental or health concerns.
It is hard to think that cheap flights can be a "dangerous convenience", but they may very well be.
Stuff like the Clean Air Act and equivalent elsewhere.
You could just burn whatever in the stove. It's your house, and castle, why not.
Turns out that didn't quite work out, so now you can't. There is no replacement for a proper log fire that's quite the same. Life goes on.
I'd imagine that the wise amongst the older generations would have a better understanding of this, and also those who grew up poor.
Go back 15 years and jetting around Europe on Ryanair flights for the cost of a night out just wasn't a thing. Didn't exist. Completely unimaginable.
Now? I can arb my flat in London against a flight and an Airbnb in a country 2000 miles away and have a weekend holiday for free. Something has to give.
"The new French tax will be 1.5 euros for flights within France or the European Union, 3 euros for economy flights out of the EU, 9 euros for intra-EU business class and up to 18 euros for business class tickets out of the EU. Transit flights will not be taxed."
I read that as most flights in or out of France being taxed.
"Transit flights" Is that a connecting flight? Seems to be the only exception.
> "Transit flights" Is that a connecting flight? Seems to be the only exception.
Makes sense, economically, in that there is quite fierce competition between CDG and other major European hub airports for filling spare intercontinental capacity and multi-hop connections are far more price sensitive than direct flights. If CDG would lose a majority of regional (but still international) feeder traffic to FRA or AMS, Paris would experience a noticeable drop in direct connections.
Oh, wasn't even aware of that group. But it only makes the threat of a traffic shift out France bigger: while a standalone Air France would be forced to defend the status of their home hub against the odds, the group would not really mind an internal shift.
According to Wikipedia (en. and de.), the French state has been divesting from air France quite a bit while the Netherlands, who had very little at the time of the merger, are about to match their government stake to parity (but both will remain at <30% combined). I'd assume that French leadership is quite aware of the risk of Air France KLM effectively becoming KLM Air France if they push too hard.
Thanks for the comment. I posted this with the original title as it was, they have changed it. I edited it just now, but I'm not going to keep checking to see if they change it again...
Maybe they changed it because it was not clear! I was also curious to know if I had misunderstood because I'm not a native English speaker. I know that "I work out of Berlin" means "I work in Berlin", so...
About time. Traveling is killing the planet. One of major causes of climate change. We need to take it seriously. I'm glad France is willing to take a bold and brave step to support the environment.
Business travel is killing our planet. All the family vacations in the world can't compete with giant companies constantly shuttling thousands of employees all around the globe to attend meetings and conferences.
You're using US statistics for some reason. Yes, Americans fly a lot. They have to visit family in a giant country with terrible rail travel options. That's why "the holidays" are far and away the busiest travel months in the US. Those trips aren't for whatever yuppie experiences you seem to look down on, but mostly to visit mom and dad.
I'd like to know how many air miles are used globally for business versus leisure. But the larger point is that business travel is mostly pointless. You can attend a meeting remotely. You can't hug your mother remotely, or sit on the beaches of Tulum remotely.
Traveling is a part of why the world is more integrated and, likely, less violent than it used to be.
People flying around is not just good for businesses and economies, people visiting other places is cultural exchange. Do you really want people to be more culturally isolated?
This 5% is released by a small minority of people. What is interesting is not how much flying consumes, but how much of one's emissions is generated by flying.
I can't believe I am living in an era that a "bold and brave step" is raising taxes. What a sad world we live in. I guess France and their leaders can sleep well knowing they have stifled the climate crisis. Pat yourself on the back France you "did something".
If they use the money for improving or subsidizing train service, then that's a good thing because it's moving more travel to trains, which are far more ecological. If you really have a problem paying a paltry 1.5 Euros for a flight, then maybe you should be saving your money instead of taking trips.
Why are Americans so obsessed with religion, devil and sins?!
Taxes exist to capture money and finance the externalities that are ignored by corporations. If corporations were more responsible countries would not have to tax these issues.
In this case France is using the money to improve an already pretty good rail system. Compare this to the US and the California train line?
"Sin Taxes" are not meant to literally tax sins but to tax behaviours with negative consequences that where the price is ultimately bourne by society. For example, the cost of second hand smoke is bourne by others, and when they get sick, many times by taxpayers. The cost of alcohol is partly bourne by a variety of parties.
"Sin Taxes" are not meant to discourage literal sins but to discourage such activities with external costs. Many argue sugar should also be added to the list of "sins" though of course it is not Biblically a sin.
I think there’s a subtle difference in intent, as elucidated by laken above[1]. Basically, if you’re doing it with the intent to reduce the behavior, it’s (best called a) sin tax. If you don’t care how much people continue to do it, as long as they’re paying, it’s (best called a) Pigovian tax.
Your name makes this incredibly amusing. Thankfully the US is more than just California and rail is functioning on the opposite side of the country. It's a shame that things can't be done but this is the system "working".
Its not a religious thing just a turn of phrase, Sin taxes are typically high taxes on unhealthy things to discourage their use.
I don't know its origin but its common in the UK.
Username checks out. A return to the etymology of the word might be a refreshing point of view: sin -- as in missing the mark, being in societal, cultural or moral error, or being less than you could be in terms of virtue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin
I've flown through a French airport once - Paris Charles de Gaulle and since have gone out of my way to not fly through it again. It was a hot mess. They lost the luggage, it was hard to find gates, parts of it looked outdated, customer service sucked. A year after, the ceiling at its _new_ terminal collapsed killing several people (https://www.thoughtco.com/charles-de-gaulle-airport-terminal...).
Maybe it was just me having a bad luck, but it was certainly enough to convince me to stay out French airports even if it means longer flights, delay or changing the duration of my stay.
I had a pretty good experience on my case, nothing to say really. The passport control queues were pretty optimized and things worked as they should. I've definitely seen much worse airport than that.
When I was last through there one of the food service employees was ripping off change from foreign travelers. When reported to the airport their response was basically, "so, what?"
"Resources were placed on this earth for the advancement of humankind"
What kind of argument is this? Is this the Christian argument that God gave us fossil fuels and all the rest, therefore mine, drill, and "burn baby, burn"? I'd think Christians would see this GIFT of life and a planet as part of a charge to take care of it.
The evidence-based view is that we live on a rocky spheroid which condensed from space-dust and asteroids forged in long-gone stars. There is no "placement" of resources, nor is there any inherent purpose to using or not using them.
I'm all for advancement of society, but it's hardly regression to not eat meat, reduce travel emissions, or reduce housing costs. Many people live very low-footprint lifestyles, it's possible and quite do-able if you're efficient and non-consumerist.
What do you think happens if we don’t dramatically reduce our carbon emissions in a very short period of time? I’ll give you a hint: it doesn’t resemble anything like the “advancement of humankind.”
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Semantic games seem silly. If the parent prefers "placed" to "existed since formed in the Earth", then let's grant them the lingual shortcut. Likewise for "for Mankind" instead of "having existed for no particular purpose but being readily available for the usage of the dominant species of the land which can heavily benefit from their extraction and processing."
I recognize that this tangent isn't particularly productive since it's so philosophical and no one is going to change their mind from a comment thread but:
I have a difficult time believing that we arrived on a planet perfectly suited for our habitation and rife with resources that become unlocked at the exact point in our progress where we have technologies that require them, purely by chance.
Nuclear trains sounds badass but no I'm not aware of them existing.
The two nuclear powered vehicles in the USA are carriers and submarines. Owned by the US military. All other nuclear generators are static and surrounded by metric fucktons of concrete.
Given that you can get from France to Algeria by land and there are extensive rail networks across all the connecting regions, including extensive rail networks in Algeria itself, built originally by the French, I would be amused to know how you came up with this conclusion.
> Given that you can get from France to Algeria by land.
The border between Morocco and Algeria is closed, and Libya has been off-limits to ordinary travelers for some years now. So, no, there is no overland travel to Algeria, only plane or ferry.
I just had a look to check what tickets would be needed for the journey and was dismayed to find that as you pass through the Middle East, it does appear that you will have to take some connecting bus services.
So it depends how you want to define 'connected', theres a continuous body of water (with locks (edit: No locks) ), but, I assume, bridges going over that water.
I really don't think we are using the same logic, but if people want to argue that Europe and Africa are not physically connected by land, then I'm going to start claiming that England and Scotland aren't either, given the distance between Carlisle and Newcastle is less than from Port Said to Suez.
Oh wait, for some reason I was under the impression that the Bering Strait would still dry up or freeze during some parts of the year allowing to reach America going east without taking a boat or a plane. My bad.
But even taking this into account, I'm not sure I understand your latest comment (the one I'm replying to right now).
EDIT: ok, after reading your comment for the umpteenth time I understood. I just have to admit I'm very bad at geography.
EDIT 2: So I'm being downvoted for admitting I was wrong?
For a moment I thought it was one of those map which for some reason don't include NZ, then I noticed it's actually on the top left.
As far as I understand, different projections are more "correct" ways of laying out the globe on a plane, so while I have your attention I'd like to ask what advantage does this has over other projections?
There are no correct projections, only different use cases. Waterman's butterfly is very low distortion, conversely on a Mercator, paths of constant bearing come out as straight lines, as it was developed for shipping.
But if France (and the rest of Europe) fails to cut down carbon emission, it's Algeria that's going to be hit harder. If France can reach 45C, imagine what will happen to Algeria.
If there is sufficient demmand, it would be obvious to build a tunnel across the Gibraltar strait. This would reasonably connect the north-west of Africa with Spain.
One might work at opening border in all the years the tunnel is being built - closed borders should't be considered a irreversable thing.
Furthermore, of course there still be flights available. The whole point is to have less flights. So some flights could be shifted to train or boat and for the rest double-checked whether the flight is still needed.
I can't fly everywhere, I still have to do the last mile some other way. In the sane way I don't expect the train to pick me up out side my house.
Further I don't expect to go to my local airport and expect to be able to travel to any other airport direct, so why should the same apply to train travel?
Because a lot of immigrants use air travel and they don't really have an alternative. A 2-day adventure involving trains, cars, ferries,hotels is much more environmentally (and physically) costly than a $300 flight.
"A 2-day adventure involving trains, cars, ferries,hotels is much more environmentally (and physically) costly than a $300 flight"
Based on what?
Sea travel is really quite efficient, so are trains, especially when we're talking about French trains powered by French nuclear.
And why are immigrants a reason that its regressive? Low paid eastern Europeans aren't going to be flying around Europe, well paid international businessmen probably will.
Edit: Ignore the "And why are immigrants a reason that its regressive", I'm confusing my threads. The point stands though. Poor immigrant doesn't necessarily correlate with having to fly.
So we shouldn't do anything to curb co2 emissions and flying because 1 group of people will find it slightly more expensive/ more awkward to go home? (I say home, if they're economic migrants they're going home? But then they aren't French voters so on some level should they get a say? On the other hand if they're 'settled' migrants that call France home, they aren't going 'home' so on some level it's a summer holiday plus).
Don't build that road, the pedestrians will have to walk out of their way to cross it. Don't build that cycle path, it takes space away from cars. Don't build that pavement.... Every transport decision has tradeoffs, no transport solution can apply to everyone. There will be immigrants from Australia who will also be affected, I have no solutions for them either.
We should act rationally, not implement random measures without forethought. I mention immigrants because international flights are disproportionately affected by this, and i think making it more difficult for them to see their family is inhumane. We don't see what is the projected effect of this law. They could have started with domestic flights or flights to places where rail travel is available instead. It would help to evaluate the effect of the measure more directly too.
Co2 has a cost that is externalised. This is attempting to start making the emitters pay directly.
I have some sympathy for those that have built their lives around the current paradigm, but the writing has been on the wall for a long time, and this really is a modest start.
Can you please not post unsubstantive comments so we don't have to ban you? If instead you'd read the guidelines and take the spirit of this site to heart, we'd be grateful.
What? It's my opinion and is true. And is probably the lowkey opinion of many other people. I'm literally in Tokyo right now cause Japan subsidizes travel instead of punishing people for it. Honestly fuck hackernews. Y'all are the actual assholes. I wasn't being mean or a dick in any way. "Unsubstantive" my ass.
The bar for a good comment here is higher than "it's my opinion". Not every opinion deserves expressing, only those that raise the signal/noise ratio. I don't see any information in the post, only that you're dissing France, which is nationalistic flamebait that counts as noise rather than signal here.
When we ban established users, we tell them we're banning them and why. Shadowbanning is for new accounts that show signs of either spamming or trolling—especially serial trolling, i.e. someone we've banned before and whose new account indicates more of the same.
It's nice how you can rename any tax to an "eco tax" and suddenly everyone's delighted. Kudos for the social engineering.
(there is absolutely no indication that this will somehow help the environment. I 'm heavily against flying , but i m also appalled by the level of gullibility here)
The funds have been earmarked for more eco-friendly transport services. It would be easy to go through the budget and see what happened. News articles can only give you so much context. It would consume an entire newspaper to give the back-story of every single news article. The reader is expected to do some work on their own. Also its not some 'random' tax. France has what they call an "ecological defense council" consisting of 150 randomly chosen citizens who debate such matters with domain experts. This idea has come out of such meetings.
No, all we have are scientific papers. And while in theory they should be considered evidence, the current financing system basically turns climate scientists into grant-seeking whores, and the results of research are determined not by facts, but by the needs of the sponsor. "Fighting" global warming is multibillion dollar business after all.
Oxfam says that the 10% richest account for 50% of air pollution. People that have enough money to travel by plane should have enough money to not destroy our environment.
If the source you're citing is Oxfam's report on Extreme Carbon Inequality[1][2], which was widely reported as saying that the world's richest 10% produce half of global carbon emissions, that is incorrect. If you read the PDF, they're only looking at estimates of "lifestyle consumption emissions", not total emissions. From the PDF:
> Emissions associated with consumption by governments, capital and international transport are therefore excluded. The proportion of total consumption emissions attributed to the lifestyle consumption of individuals varies by country, but globally accounts for around 64% of the total.
> Oxfam’s estimates should only be considered indicative of the orders of magnitude, but also as conservative...
The report also says that women are hit harder by climate change than men and disparages "carbon baron billionaires". Petroleum companies aren't growing faster than the rest of the economy, so it's unclear what argument they're actually making.
Such blatant misrepresentation and pandering caused me to lose trust in Oxfam.
> Around 50% of these emissions meanwhile can be attributed to the 10% richest of people around the world, who have average carbon footprints 11 times as high as the poorest half of the population, and 60 times as high as the poorest 10%. The average footprint of the richest 1% of people globally could be 175 times that of the poorest 10%.
Again, that's "lifestyle consumption emissions", not total emissions. The poorest 10% make less than $2 per day. Of course they're going to be a rounding error in terms of "lifestyle consumption emissions". And before you get upset about super wealthy people burning lots of fossil fuels, remember that to be in the richest 10%, you only need to have an income above $16k/year.[1] If you make more than $100k/year, you are in the top 0.1%.[2]
Hah, no. They get rich, because the more wealth you have, the easier it is to increase it. Why? Because this is how the rich and powerful have set up the rules of the game.
Personal wealth does not correlate with any sort of "value" you have personally created.
> They get rich, because the more wealth you have, the easier it is to increase it.
The more wealth you have the easier it is to provide value to other people. That's known as capital investment, and it's how wealth begets more wealth.
Or they could just spend all that wealth they've saved on themselves. People inclined to do that generally don't become wealthy in the first place, however, barring abnormal circumstances such as winning the lottery. A habit of frivolous, conspicuous consumption is a good way to ensure that you don't stay wealthy for long.
From Wikipedia: «Fascism ... characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society and of the economy».
There are people who see the enforcement of the green agenda in these terms, like this: you can't speak publicly against it, you can't act openly against it, and it gets forced on the economy through the power of the state.
I personally think that such a view is a bit of a exaggeration. But we should remember that the danger of fascism is always around the corner, in the groupthink and in the enforcement of One True Way in anything.
>>"[..]you can't speak publicly against it, you can't act openly against it,[..]"
By this, I suppose you mean that, if you do it, you will get some angry answers in your direction, but, is that not true about anything deserving to talk about?
It works in the other direction too: I have heard pretty harsh insults against ecologist (yeah, sometimes they are even called fascists).
>>"[..] and it gets forced on the economy through the power of she state."
Yes, but all economic organization is forced through the power of the state, starting by property rights. So, nothing new there.
I'm mostly talking about a PR suicide that is speaking against beliefs of majority, or even a vocal minority. This has real economic consequences, so it makes businesses stay in line with the accepted beliefs by talking the only language that matters to them.
Yes, a state is an instiute of enforcement, violent if needed. Nothing new here indeed. People just tend to see enforcement of ideas they like as good, and of the ideas they don't like, as evil. Nothing new here either.
I just tried to explain the train of thought that may have led to the original (flagged) comment.
Okay, but how does that relate to fascism? Really, you'd expect fascists to advocate the opposite actions, because of the strong nationalist component of fascism- wouldn't they tend to favor actions that benefit France and disregard global externalities?
This is simply rent seeking. It won't reduce flights, it's too small to incentivize any fuel efficiency changes, it's passed on to the consumer so it won't alter airline behavior, and while the article claims the revenue will go towards financing trains, it doesn't state how that will be implemented. Are they going to reduce fees on trains accordingly? Are they going to improve train efficiency? Are they going to build additional infrastructure? It's possible that they could do all these things and cause a tiny shift away from air travel toward less-polluting options, but it's more likely just another general tax revenue source that's politically easier to acquire because it's easy to demonize airlines. I'm not defending airlines; they pollute a lot. I just don't see how this helps.
Trains in France are State-owned and heavily indebted, so more money would just mean reducing some of that debt; even then, the amount of money expected to be taxed (~200 M€) is nothing compared to the national railway budget, which is around 30-40B €.
It should be easy to see what happened to the tax revenue in the budget numbers. Large taxes and fees are risky. Governments are usually careful to not put an entire industry (including thousands of jobs) at risk of overnight collapse. Also, airlines already benefit from aviation fuel tax exemptions (to the tune of billions of dollars). Maybe we should be looking at slowly getting rid of those too.
Not GP, but any action that does not occur at a global level is nothing more than a feel-good measure. You're kidding yourself if you think that this, or even this multiplied across all of Europe would make a dent in climate change. Meanwhile, it allows people to feel like they're doing something, reducing the likelihood that we will actually see a globally coordinated effort to really change direction on the climate.
Exactly. It's like recycling. It lets people feel like they're doing something, raises prices, but doesn't actually achieve any of the objectives used to market it.
If you want to reduce pollution, regulate it, cap it, and provide penalties for breaching limits that far outweigh the profits for cheaters. Simply taxing everything never changes behavior.
Ideally, with absolutely no loss of comfort, no extra taxes, while maintaining our current wasteful lifestyles. We can barely get people to sort their trash into plastics/glass/paper before throwing it away and we say stuff like "I just don't see how this [measure that introduces taxes which would make people less likely to book flights] helps". And this is in a place like Hacker News, which is supposed to sort of towards the tail end of the human intelligence distribution.
Day by day, I'm starting to think we are royally fucked.
Depends. I believe that regional feeder connections, where fuel cost is a lower fraction of total expenses than for longer distances would still have a lot of unexplored fuel economy improvement opportunities left. Even speed isn't terribly important there. Unfortunately, due to bigger picture economic incentives, feeder connections would likely be the last to suffer taxation/loss of subsidies.
At the same time people are shamed for buying salad in a plastic bag when the big lever is somewhere completely different. Had the same thought yesterday when I saw:
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1148317244893597696