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You can just fine the companies rather than incentivising them to run empty planes.

Better yet, institute a proper carbon tax and either a carefully thought-out market for slots and/or fines.

Fines are not a solution. When you hear about fines, it is typically some government trying to save face on the media:

- The collected fine will not be used to undo the damage to the market/competitors.

- The fine won't ever exceed the profits gained by the company because of the infringement. Or else the company will contest it as unfair.

That's why you read "EU fines Google with 5 billion" and Google doesn't really care. They will go through the moves of pretending they care, maybe try to shave off part of the fine, but at the end of the day, it's business as usual.

Sounds like the solution then is to just make the fines more severe.

5 billion might be an acceptable loss for Google. 50 billion might not be.

The whole point of the rule is that it's more expensive to not run the flights than to run them with few passengers. So the fine would need to be higher than the cost of operating the flight resulting in the exact same outcome.

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