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Comment by seunosewa | Hacker News Reader

Please explain how you obtained the 8% figure.

Not the parent poster, but if we assume fuel costs are 20% of total expenses [1] then a 40% tax on the fuel, if completely passed on to the customer, would make each flight 8% more expensive.

Whether 40% correctly offsets pollution externalities is a tougher question.

[1] https://www.transportation.gov/administrations/assistant-sec...

jet-a is a /lot/ more expensive since that article was written ;-)

Note though it's not fuel cost we're taxing, but carbon, so more efficiently made fossil fuels would be cheaper and have less carbon tax, even if they are chemically indistinguishable from other fuels and contain the exact same number of fossil carbon atoms.

Things like, does the delivery truck have an efficient engine. Does the refinery use green or gray hydrogen to desulpherise the inputs, do they buy their fossil fuels from Norway vs Russia and so on.

It might only be a small difference but small differences across the whole economy is how the carbon tax is supposed to work.

The EU calculate that as the price rise that would result in 2050 from their net zero plans.

Here's an aviation industry take on the plans, which seek to reduce the carbon by 55% by 2030

https://www.eurocontrol.int/article/eus-fit-55-package-what-...

But it's easy enough to find CO2 calculators and estimated costs of carbon and compare with current flight costs to get your own number for flights that matter to you.

When people do this though, they think "This seems suspiciously cheap? I thought this was going to take us back to the stone age, not just make long transatlantic flights a bit more expensive by not subsidizing them as much" then they come up with conspiracy theories about how it's all greenwashing to make sense of it all.

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