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Comment by flexie | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

As I write this, I imagine people are rushing to their phones to cancel their transatlantic business class tickets because of the 18 euro surcharge.

I’ll be traveling via barge for the foreseeable future because of this tax.

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.

The stock price of Air France barely took a hit, and already rebounded.

Yes, but that doesn’t ‘recover’ anything

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.

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