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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

Recently there has been some talk about banning air miles programs and actually flipping the incentives. Because you have to fly under your government ID it wouldn't be out of the question for people who fly a lot to pay more per mile in taxes.

I've been thinking about this a lot trying to root out the unintended consequences of such a plan, but I can't think of any.

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Wouldn't a carbon tax on the source, when fossil fuels are extracted, be more effective?

You'd still be paying more for longer and more frequent flying, but you'd also be hitting personal jets harder than full flights, less fuel efficient planes and flight paths against better ones - and it would be reduced even further if an airline managed to electrify.

Although that still ignores the additional warming effect of radiative forcing caused by flight.

https://curiosity.com/topics/airplane-contrails-are-contribu...

The proposals i've seen are nonlinear. Each person gets, say, one flight a year with no Frequent Flyer Tax. Your second flight is taxed at 100 dollars. Your third, 200 dollars, Your fourth, 300 dollars, etc.

The trick is to pitch it so that you don't have much impact on the 85% of the population who do 30% of the flying, but you strongly discourage the 15% of the population who do 70% of the flying [1]. Partly as a practical measure to ensure it's not so unpopular it gets repealed, but partly because those 15% are probably capable of making changes to their lifestyle or way of working that will drastically cut flights, whereas the other 85% are flying where they have to, to see their family at christmas or whatever, or for their one summer holiday.

You couldn't do that by taxing fuel, or aeroplanes, or anything other than individual people flying.

[1] https://fullfact.org/economy/do-15-people-take-70-flights/

That's a neat idea, but aren't most frequent flyers doing it for business reasons? In which case the business will pay the tab for the tax increase, most likely.

Businesses have a wide latitude to spend on aviation because business travel done right is incredibly lucrative.

The wrinkle I see with escalation of taxes per person per year is while my company would happily pick up the tab for work travel, I’d be upset if my Christmas trip home cost me thousands more because I’d done a handful of business trips.

Then that sounds like escalating taxes would be an extremely effective incentive for behaviour change, despite the fact that employers will be picking up most of the costs!

Or equally likely an extremely effective way to encourage private driving and private flying, both of which are less energy efficient and safe than long-haul airline flights.

Not to mention creating confusion and hassle for travelers, whose ticket price can’t be calculated and paid in advance (because you don’t know how many trips I’ll have taken before that flight), or who share a common name.

one way would be to make it revenue neutral as in take the money from frequent flyers and give it back as tax refund. then people will want more of it.

I can see a few with flipping incentives - flight is a subsituable good and a fuzzy one. While not encouraging it for its own sake is fair the alternatives may be worse.

I know of one case where a coworker ended a business trip by taking vacation days and a several day cross Atlantic cruise ship home which was likely worse than even a plane trip to an island as it didn't involve hauling essentially an entire luxury hotel thousands of miles.

I suspect a better idea for encouragement if anything would be subsidizing efficient clear neccessity/better than current baseline transit. Like say if living closer to work was subsidized along with public transit - both replacing or shortening automobile commutes.

This is a terrible idea. Some people have no choice but to fly. Say what you want but air travel is efficient.

Frequent and cheap air travel is a recent phenomenon, we can abandon it without going back to the Stone Age.

Who has no choice but to fly three or more times a year? Do they really have no choice?

I am reminded of an acquaintance of mine who once told me he had no choice but to drive, because he lived in a little village with one bus a day, but commuted into London. What he had overlooked is that he'd chosen to live in this village.

Pretty sure it doesn't take a literal ton of fuel to move me across Europe in a train. In an airplane, it does.

Depends on the plane and the load factor. Assuming a conservative 80 mpg per seat a flight from Moscow to London would consume the following to move your tail between locations:

1554 miles / (80 miles/gallon) * 6.8 lbs/gallon = 132 lbs

I was actually a bit surprised how little it is. It gets better in newer aircraft assuming all seats are taken.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_fuel

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#Mediu...

Time is more valuable.

Indeed it is.

There'll be time after us.

You aren't against pricing in more of the externalities though, right?

For example, a round trip flight between NY and London is said to melt 3 cubic meters of arctic ice per passenger. So it wouldn't be unreasonable for airlines to be required to offset that in some way?

If so, then we just disagree on how to structure the tax but mostly agree on the need to reduce damaging flights.

What remarkable luck they were born after planes were invented!

You might actually see a huge lift in private aviation as I don’t have to show government ID or otherwise check in with the government for those flights (provided they take off and land in the US). You can’t even necessarily track the tail numbers of the airplane if it operates from non-towered airports away from our largest 150 or so airports and under 10K feet (so piston airplanes).

You would also displace a lot of travel to private autos, with a decrease in safety/increase in fatalities and typically an increase in fuel consumption when comparing a single occupancy car to a fairly full flight. Plus, if I’m going to be driving a car 500 miles pretty regularly, I’m going to splurge for a nice, big, comfy car and it’s not going to be an electric. Since I currently fly rather than drive on road trips, today I can drive a small electric as my daily driver.

> I've been thinking about this a lot trying to root out the unintended consequences of such a plan, but I can't think of any.

Record keeping, administration, etc.

You could replace it all with simple calculations:

Landing Tax: (tax rate) * (landing weight) * (distance traveled within US airspace)

Takeoff Tax: (tax rate) * (takeoff weight)

Record keeping is already in place for the air miles programs. It's a solved problem.

The two taxes you listed do nothing to make people who travel more pay more per mile than somebody doing their one flight a year to Disney.

What's the motivation behind making it a progressive scale per mile?

Is there a reason the Nth mile should be taxed more than the 1st when the environmental impact of the Nth mile and the 1st are the same?

In fact the impact of the 1st is substantially greater, because of the energy required for takeoff.

And since takeoff weight is linked to both passenger count & traveled distance (amount of fuel), it too accounts for distance!

I'm pretty sure that there are certain airlines that are nearly unprofitable from their actual airline operations, but only eke a decent profit due to their airline miles programs (specifically their credit card rewards programs). So it seems like you are suggesting that we should remove a huge profit center from airlines.

Wouldn’t they raise prices to compensate?

Why should you pay more the more you fly, and not just a fixed rate per ton of CO2?

Why do you pay more in taxes on the second dollar you earn compared to the first? It's an acknowledgment that flying is a useful activity for many people, but still an incentive to minimize unnecessary flights.

I think part of the motivation is to not punish infrequent fliers.

I think it's a little like how utilities price water. Water is very inexpensive at first. But if you are filling a pool and watering your lawn a lot, the gallons get more and more expensive.

Where does this carbon "tax" go? For example if the U.S. federal government imposed this tax it's just gets paid to the government to use on whatever?

In Canada, the carbon tax revenue is given back as a rebate which results in a net tax decrease for most families. In the US there have been proposals to use the revenue to cut payroll taxes, I believe Harvard economist (and notably former republican) Greg Mankiw has been pushing this idea for years now.

Where the tax revenue goes isn't the biggest deal since getting a price on carbon alone will result in shifting incentives towards lower carbon behaviors and investments. In my experience watching debates about Carbon Taxes where I live, generally speaking, when people complain about where the money is going they are not arguing in good faith and trying to just spread FUD about the policy to prevent a carbon tax.

Thanks for the first part of your response. Those uses seem potentially interesting.

The second part of your response is somewhat frustrating though. It absolutely does matter what the tax is used for. This can’t just be an excuse for the total tax that I pay to be increased with the additional funds being put towards things like war fighting in far off lands. That’s maybe not as much of a problem in Canada as it is in the U.S. It’s unreasonable to dismiss any concerns about how the tax revenue is used as FUD.

I personally would like to see it go to public universities to fund basic research in areas related to climate change.

Some of it should but since Carbon taxes could be regessive some type of rebate to people on the lower end of the income scale would be good also.

I think that’s thats brilliant. Many people fly far more than necessary. A carbon tax is important, but this could simply punish the frivolity of most air travel.

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