I'd rather call it blatantly opinionated... taking to its full conclusion the logic of considering commitments (i.e. money alloted) through the way energy is consumed instead of the way energy is produced (the fuel you put into the plane's reactors was not produced by the plane, was it?), you may as well say that any natalist policy is a commitment towards fossil fuels because humans in the end consume fossil fuels. Tautology at its best.
But again, doing regular bailouts is not necessarily tipping the scales in the anti-environmentally friendly direction. They can be neutral. They are neutral if they did not change the behaviour in relative flight usage comparatively to before the pandemic.
Using this reasoning for example will make flight subsidies anti-environmentally friendly and not neutral (if you also do not subsidies other modes of transportation).
Obviously this is hard to judge, but the article (from what I can tell) does not study that, so I wrote "a little misleading".
I think that's what France did?
> Using this reasoning for example will make flight subsidies anti-environmentally friendly and not neutral
We have to reduce CO2 emissions by 7% a year (Germany, according to the IPCC). So besides laws and regulation, I'd argue that a crisis and the subsequently necessary bailouts are a good chance to force companies to do more. Before going bankrupt, they'd probably agree to the deal.
Mainstream commercial electric aviation is probably a half a century away (provided we don't actually discover something even better that supercedes it).
The same goes for personal cars, the governments are all too happy to give money directly to the high-middle-classes so that they could buy EVs costing north of 40,000 euros while imposing very high taxes (when not banning them altogether) for 10 to 15-year old SH cars favoured by the low and low-middle classes (because that's all that they can afford).
The Financial Times has had a really interesting article [1] on this a couple of days ago from the perspective of those high-middle class people, some of them are worried that the low and low-middle-class people will revolt once put in front of these new realities (like the Gilets Jaunes have done in France), but imo they will most probably do nothing of the sort.
Edit: Nevermind, misread.
Also, I have a feeling that hydrogen got a disproportionally bad reputation after Hindenburg. After all, people do travel in devices that are loaded with gasoline and jet fuel, so it's not like it isn't possible to safely handle flammable material.
And your comparison of zeppelins to cars and planes is flawed. The former consists chiefly of an extremely flammable gas. Protecting it is a thin layer of canvas (which can also burn). The latter contain a relatively small container of liquid which is protected by layers of solid metal and foam and all kinds of valves.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/helium-hokum...
Getting into the article, I expected something more direct, like for example if they passed car gas subsidies.
I partially agree. If your subsidies are helping parts of the agriculture that are more polluting than the industry average, then you are increasing the environmental pollution.
But this does not apply to my argument for 2 reasons: 1. I am talking about bailouts. They rather don't influence the long-term prices of flights. They are one time thing, intended to help some companies not die. 2. Even the agriculture subsidies you mention I would not call "fossil fuel commitments", which is misleading. Better name for them is something like "subsidies that encourage pollution" or "subsidies that encourage increase CO2 emissions".