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.
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.
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.
I’ll be traveling via barge for the foreseeable future because of this tax.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://citizensclimatelobby.org/carbon-fee-and-dividend/
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.
Right after I sold my beachfront house in Arizona.
Eg: 'When I sold my Manhattan mountain lodge.'
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.
I guess that's why the tax is on take-off, so everyone can afford landing!
Bad jokes aside France has a huge highspeed rail network.
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.
"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.
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 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...
"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.
So, until we have a unified front for addressing climate change, that doesn't exclude a single source of pollution, we should sit on our hands?
The climate doesn't care where the pollution comes from. Any reduction is a win.
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.)
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 can buy TWO berlin<>mallorca round trips for the same price as a single taxi trip from berlin to the airport.
https://www.google.com/flights?hl=en#flt=/m/0156q./m/0jwz5.2...
And if you're contending they're different I assume one is supposed to cut down use.
Both Pigouvian & sin taxes usually go into general revenue and are rarely targeted.
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.
Of course if flying costs more people will fly less.
Last I checked we didn't even have more than one or 2 routes to Spain by train, due to different gauges, and spain has different gauges from france.
If you want to go from Paris to Lisbon by train expect a whole day of travel if not more, with multiple changes
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.
If not, conversation is indeed over and baseless.
If yes, what alternative do we have help reduce carbon emissions in the atmosphere? (because this is something to do, and fast now)
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.
Flying as is is a luxury, economy class or not, and we shouldn't forget that.
Interesting that they are also not taxing transits, meaning if you just transfer through CDG, you aren’t paying the tax.
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.
I wonder if this means flying out of the French side of Geneva airport would incur the fee while the Swiss side would not?
(Edit, it seems like the French side no longer exists after Switzerland entered the Schengen).
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.
Convenience fees are basically dark business method patterns.
Nothing a cheque can’t solve.
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)
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.
Use trains.
I do not know of a commercial airport without a train station. There do however appear to be plenty of rail stations that do not have airports.
>you can't (easily) take a train to a destination outside EU.
Britain is about to test this theory. But also, that is nonsense. Passenger trains leave and enter the EU all the time.
Could you contact me when I would be able to buy a Paris-Tunis train ticket, please?
Leeds Bradford
One is planned to be built though.
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.
But not taxing carbon is also “regressive”, in that climate change will disproportionately hurt the world’s poorest.
Maybe not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Why can't we have good things?
This initiative makes trains more competitive. Trains are greener and often quicker especially for intra-european continental routes.
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
b) You can appear just at departure time
It is still very early but there are projects working on electric flight.
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.
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.