However, those bailouts could have been tied to limiting short-distance flights. At least in Europe, trains are a good alternative for many short-distance flights.
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.