France bans short-haul flights to cut carbon emissions | Hacker News Reader

France bans short-haul flights to cut carbon emissions

bbc.com

51 pointsTurukawa56 comments

Elevating news, there's hope yet for reining in air travel emissions by more realistic means than pie in the sky tech solutions.

Bans are inefficient and coercive. It would be better to tax fuels according to the emissions they produce.

Why not both, as the meme says. The regulation is good because it directs consumer spending into the sustainable rail program. The fuel tax would also be good for its own reasons.

They ban relative to what trains can provide and since French electricity emits few co2 it's quite and interesting thing to do. I agree on wors of "ban"chosen though. It's more of a market correction, in regards to AirFrance and SNCF (trains) being both government supported.

"Bans are inefficient" , any source on this ?

This is a real question. Bans "seems" to me as an efficient tool, but I have no source either...

Suppose you think the environmental cost of flying between two cities is 100 euros more than taking a train. Then if someone prefers to fly even with a 100 euro carbon tax on flying, it is inefficient to prohibit him or her from doing so.

Only if the harm can and will be undone quickly with the collected tax.

But also, we prohibit lots acts that are harmful to others, instead of taxing them. It's also a moral thing. Values are changing and increasing share of people are seeing unnecessary emissions as a wrong.

Prohibition comes to mind. Not sure if the analogy works, but it does come to mind as something that I believe was a pretty inefficient ban where the impetus was likewise for the welfare of people.

Taxing liquor would have been a far better approach.

Flying an airplane in a prohibited way is usually very evident though. Not so much with consumer sales/trade.

Are you suggesting there could be a black market for... flying? Seems unlikely to me.

No, just that it was inefficient relative to taxing. Though tbh, I wonder why people who think taxing would be more efficient believe that. It seems like it would come with more bureaucratic inefficiencies and regulations trying to figure out how much to tax.

A clear well defined ban seems more efficient and straightforward, as long as it can be enforced. In this case - unlike for prohibition - it can be enforced like you point out.

A single trip between Paris and Nantes is calculated (using some random website) to be between 0.1-0.3 tons of Co2 per person on the plane.

Using some other random website, the same trip for one person on train is calculated to be 2kg.

So that makes it a factor of about 100x. How much could the tax be that would still make it distinguishable from a ban? How would people react if say the tax would be 1€ per kg?

This is the wrong way of looking at it. What is the cost to offset or sequester that 0.1-0.3 tons? That should be the worst case premium.

Everyone seems to be missing the major point— connecting flights are excluded. This measure is largely symbolic and will have no impact.

On the other hand, it would be great to see airlines forced to accommodate passengers who miss flights due to delayed trains (and vice versa) as well as greater cooperation between rail and air carriers.

Hopefully countries with poor rail infrastructure such as Germany do not adopt France’s approach.

> Hopefully countries with poor rail infrastructure such as Germany do not adopt France’s approach.

Germany does not have a poor rail infrastructure.

Depends on how you define „poor rail infrastructure“. Germany has a lot of routes and pretty much everything is well connected, but the state that the infrastructure is in with constant delays and badly maintained tracks is pretty bad.

don't forget that compared to france, germany has a far more distributed population density, This makes rails far harder to maintain.

Do you know why in 2023, this is the case? It has long irked me that rail is maybe 150 years old and yet somehow it costs outrageous money to maintain. I don't understand the "it is harder to maintain". Has there been no advancement?

A distributed population means it runs through more (a greater quantity of) populated areas.

This means more stations, more switches, and more road crossings. It also means when you need to do maintenance to the track you are more likely to be in a populated area which brings noise constraints, so possibly no working through the night. It means more road closures or interruptions, which may require traffic control.

Ironically it's going to be more expensive today than it was in the past when things like noise in the middle of the night was allowed and roads didn't have any car traffic to manage.

I don't think it's symbolic. A lot of point-to-point PDEW would take trains instead, which is a win.

So now anything that was on a plane must now travel on the roads. It's not like the need to move from point A to B has been removed. Road travel has a much higher net impact on climate. How is this in any way good? The law of unintended consequences really applies here.

In France, people take fully electric high speed (150-200mph trains.

Spain also. Far nicer way to travel. Often faster when you account for travelling to and from the airport and air travel waiting times

https://parisbytrain.com/tgv-map/

The purple lines are the high speed ones, and the (very few) yellow lines would be considered high speed in America.

The system is a miracle.

Will it manage to handle the capacity of the air travel that is being removed?

A TGV Duplex carries 510 passengers at 300km/h. For instance the TGV line going to south east France carries 75000 passengers per day with a theoretical capacity at 350000 passengers per day. I let you convert that into airplanes ;)

Air France domestic backbone is home-grown a320s. Standard layout in their use of those is 174 pax.

TGV Sud-Est is 350000 / 174 ~= 2012 flights per day.

There's no airport in the world that handles traffic like that. ATL comes close at 1970 flights daily, but this 2012 is only the capacity on TGV Sud-Est. This doesn't count any of the other lines, of which there are many: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_TGV_services

Trains are really intense.

France’s train network is pretty good if you’re going towards or away from Paris.

But if you’re going from Brittany (in the NW) or Nantes to the SW (Toulouse or Bordeaux), driving is going to beat the train.

There is direct train between Nantes and Bordeaux, but you are right driving is about 1:30 faster.

Very, very much yes. There's no mode with more capacity than trains.

Not only is train much better at handling large amount of capacity, it do so with a lower carbon footprint. Looking at the transportation sector in EU-27:

"Within the transport sector, aviation was responsible for 13.2 % of GHG emissions(144.3 megatonnes CO2 equivalent (Mt CO2e) and rail for 0.4 % (4.3 Mt CO2e). The latter refers to the emissions by diesel trains only. This compares with a share of 71.8 % for road transport and a share of 14.1 % for navigation (EC, 2020b)" (EEA Report No 19/2020)

There is a good reason why trains are commonly used between mines and ports. A single train can have around 70-100 of cars, each loaded with 100 tons of Ore. To do the same with planes would be impossible expensive and the emissions would be insane.

The only thing that can get near in terms of capacity and emissions are boats, although that sector is in large need of modernization. They discussed this in an other article about France, since they got several large rivers that could see increased utilization by the transportation sector.

Obviously in both cases, transportation will take longer. I would assume that some delivery services will be exempted when a slower transportation is not suitable.

Wait until it results in longer flights that are still quicker than taking the roads or the train.

Amazing that they missed the point that you are raising /s

>So now anything that was on a plane must now travel on the roads.

Tell me you know nothing about France without telling me you know nothing about France.

Or Spain, for that matter. Or Germany. Or...

What do you mean by "anything"? There can't be that many things that can be transported by planes and cars/trucks but not by trains. Are you allowed to take pets on the TGV?

Assuming that the only alternative to air travel in Europe is to drive wins "most American comment of the day" for sure :)

Flights within the European Economic Area are already subject to the EU ETS[1], so banning certain flights may not have the intended effect of lowering emissions. It will just free up emission rights for other emitters.

[1] https://climate.ec.europa.eu/eu-action/eu-emissions-trading-...

This same conceptual problem also exists in oil/gas use - unless we ramp down successfully ramp them down everywhere, they will be dug up and burned, while regulation just changes where and how.

But this legislation has other more important effects the immediate ones - it's a symbolic act that opens the door for more similar legislation. And eliminating sectors of emissions will make room in the ETS system for more essential uses, decreasing prices in other sectors.

> eliminating sectors of emissions will make room in the ETS system for more essential uses

I'm worried it might make room for less essential uses. Each buyer removed from the market, lowers the market price. So it will bring back the buyers that were previously priced out.

Yes, this does presume that the maximum price a buyer is willing to pay, corresponds to how "essential" their use is. But I guess that's the premise of ETS.

Meanwhile, China is building coal plants like there's no tomorrow... https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-...

> same journey could be made by train in under two-and-a-half hours

If the trains are on strike are you allowed to fly then?

Except there wouldn't be any flights

Does this, like so many other climate related laws, have a private jet exemption?

I would be curious to look at the raw numbers and how they were computed. France has been a net importer of electricity for a few years now, since we decided to shut down a few nuclear facilities. As a result we're importing a mix of electricity produced mainly by surrounding countries, like germany, where electricity is emitting far more CO2 than our local one (probably by a factor of 100x).

3-7x is a bit more realistic than x100, which would make basically zero difference to the comparison even if only imported electricity was used.

So pro-nuclear that I prefer airplanes to electric trains is a new and exciting angle on the climate discussion though.

My recent observations with regard to green parties suggestion is that they're pointing at the wrong direction pretty much all the time.

two recent case in point : they've been closing nuclear power plant in france and germany non stop, and as a consequence we're burning even more russian gaz than before, and since the war the horribly polluting gaz imported from the US.

Second example : they've passed a law in france to force home owner to better insulate their housing, but the implementation details are so messed up that all they've managed to do is make renting even more impossible for students.

So now, every time i see a law beeing passed under pressure of green parties, i look at where the horrible side effect is going to be this time.

France has been closing nuclear power plants non-stop??? Some reactors are EOL, the same is true for the USA and other countries since the nuclear power plant building boom was on the 70s and early 80s. However, France is still very pro nuclear power.

france used to be pro nuclear, but we've started the denuclearization process almost 15 years ago ( by not building new ones, not reopening restaured ones, and selling pieces of our companies that knew how to do it).

It's now at a point where we're trying to catch up with the latest tech in nuclear powerplant building coming from the US ( and probably china), with close-to-retirement engineers while they're still working, instead of being at the forefront of that technology.

No, especially in the past few weeks since Germany went ahead and closed its last nuclear power, France's electricity has really been 10-30x less carbon intensive most of the time.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map

Your source, over your selected timescale, also shows both production and consumption, and over that time period France's electricity imports took it from 29mg to 30mg which means the high speed trains retain their two order of magnitude climate advantage over plane travel.

Oh absolutely, I agree with that. Mass electrification of travel + low carbon production is a winning combination (and it's going to be a headache for countries like Germany)

If you are curios here is the real time French electricity data platform: https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix

and the German one: www.smard.de

Not sure about yearly data but France seems to export lots of electricity right now. As you say, France has very low co2 emission per kwh compared to Germany, that is due to the atomic electricity production.

The ban is relative to "how long does it take to go there by train", I agree it's weird to compute that. Especially thinking about the potential of SNCF and AirFrance maybe considering their impact respectively. It's a good concern and we need to watch that.

Not really : France is exporting electricity most of the time, with a carbon intensity that's indeed typically 10-30x lower than Germany's See https://app.electricitymaps.com/map

Taxation > regulation

I'm generally pro pricing in externalities but this is a good example of using regulations to cut a Gordian knot of system interactions.

Good advert for citizen climate assemblies.

I believe this but the ship has sailed.

Taxation was the compromise, and it was not taken up in a serious way. Regulation is the next step. Now the onus is on other parts of the economy to realize that they need to handle externalities or they will be regulated too.

I'm seeing a lot of this (failing to realize one is in a position where compromise is necessary); the idea that we have 50 years to spar affably over this is now going to come to an end.

This a problem across the political spectrum.

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