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Comment by zamadatix | Hacker News Reader

"A tenth of all departure flights in 2019 were by private jets, T&E research found"

That's quite a lot more than I expected. Still I'm a bit disappointed there isn't more interest in going for high enough taxation to have it subsidize cleaner emissions elsewhere (e.g. about half the power in France still comes from oil and gas) rather than outright bans. If someone really wants to pay that much to get somewhere let them pay to create net reductions instead of focusing on how much that trip would create.

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I don't think I've ever seen a better example of consumer choice/free market ideology run amok. So instead of just banning something that's bad we have people fly around needlessly and then tax them so we can take their money and build a carbon capture plant next to their private airport, and we all do this so we're not mean to them?

> instead of focusing on how much that trip would create.

you need to focus on that anyway if you put a tax on their behavior

They would leave and take their tax revenue with them.

Would they really? Because they can't fly?

A very questionable assertion, that is trotted out any time we talk about making the rich pay for their excesses.

Being able to fly domestically is not the sole reason wealthy people live in France

Pay to play. If they want a piece of the economy they pay to get it.

I mean I guess carbon capture could be an option but it's probably bottom of the list in terms of effective things to use the subsidies for. Primarily I'd imagine it going to cost offsetting the transition to greener alternatives for other things people want to stop using as I gave examples of above. We would do it because it's better for everyone involved, even at the individual level. Nobody here has said we'd do it because it's mean to ban things.

> you need to focus on that anyway if you put a tax on their behavior

The tax would focus on the emissions not the behavior. If you mean "someone needs to calculate the emissions caused by the behavior" well sure but that's hardly making the behavior a focus let alone the focus.

But taxing means there's an opportunity for revenue to build more green infrastructure. Yes, that tax needs revisited in the future to make sure it's still accomplishing it's goal, but Europe is currently in the midst of an energy crisis due to lack of investment in local green power infrastructure (and instead relying on Russian gas for electricity). What solves this problem? Investment! What does investment require? Money! What do taxes generate? Money!

>about half the power in France still comes from oil and gas)

What ? Unless you're talking about global consumption, at the time of writing this comment, 12% of our electricity production comes from gas (https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FR), and despite the situation being dogshit throughout Europe, the only countries cleaner than us at the moment are Norway (because shitloads of hydro and small country), Sweden (because small country and shitloads of nuclear) and Slovenia (because small country and shitloads of hydro). On a good day (read: when half of our nuclear reactors aren't busy being broken), we're at 40g eqCO2/kWh.

I guess that's what I get for taking the front chart on Wikipedia at face value. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_France seems to have some weirdly adjusted chart generated by British Petroleum of all sources as the main image. I'm not even sure I understand what the heck the "inefficiency" factor they applied is supposed to be based on.

Thanks for the correction.

That source would be from the bp statistical review of world energy, a widely quoted and surprisingly impartial collection of energy statistics. Charts and stats from that annual publication turn up all over the place. Disappointly, they're going to stop publishing it from next year.

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