It's sad when otherwise mostly-free countries do things like this. If you don't understand why this is bad, imagine if the people in charge had the opposite preferences and instead banned going by train between cities linked by commercial flights.
Imagine if all evidence pointed to train travel between cities being much worse than air travel. Then yes, banning the trains could be the right call.
How about allocating carbon credits to people, annually? No trading. You have to budget. From the poorest hobo to Jeff Besos, everybody gets the same. But even that doesn't work. People will use their carbon! It would be like allocated PTO: none will be left on the table at the end of the year. So by setting a budget you are simultaneously ensuring that it becomes the minimum carbon emissions per person, unless you let people cash in unused carbon credits! The hobo gets a Christmas bonus from the CO² man!
But the whole system would be impossible to track and police.
This thing the French are doing, works.
Its efficient and simple and enforceable.
Carbon taxes on the other hand would be a bureaucratic nightmare as you've pointed out. It would require far more oversight, would be harder to enforce, require so much tax dollars spent to just manage the system taxing short flights etc etc. It reeks of inefficiency and overregulation when I think about it.
France's national conversation seems to be increasingly realising that we're heading towards a difficult future and pre-empting it.
Anglo societies seem to find this much harder to reckon with.
It's because of our astonishingly bad common law system. The worst thing that England gave to the world.
I do like the principle that all things being equal, cases should get decided the same way, and we technically have the option of amending the law for clarity if courts seem to interpret it strangely.
It does seem like it can slow laws down, which seems like a possible advantage in some contexts for the stability and continuity of society, but possibly a major downside if you need to act quickly.
I think our common law system is one of the best things about our country
Take the housing market, for example. The entire thing is nothing but a massive U.S. subsidy towards homeownership. Subsidies by the govt insuring 30 year fixed mortgages, while lots of carve outs in the tax code to promote housing, actual, literal intervention in the market over the past century to bail out homeowners, and companies whose failures would wreck the homeownership market, subsidized funding for infrastructure to keep those homes livable, etc.
I can't read the original source: can anyone confirm if this bans private flights or only scheduled flights? I mean could Elon Musk still fly between rail-linked cities in France if he wanted to?
But, in this case, that logic doesn't seem to apply. There is nothing "free market" about either air or rail travel. Both exist within and only because of the structure of government, and would not exist without regulation and subsidy.
* the situation they're trying to bring about with this law
or
* the same situation we have now except the gov't is taking more of people's money
In case of taxing, these would continued to have been used, and people and animals not using them would have experienced acute health externalities associated with these substances.
I believe mountains of evidence strongly suggest cigs are worse for us and cause a much worse net negative harm on society via increased long-term strain on our healthcare sector. But, just like planes, people hold onto cigarettes as a right to freedom and attach unwarranted stigma on psychedelics (just like some attach unwarranted stigma on using trains).
Banning cigs in some circumstances where the other is allowed makes sense if we just think about overall human welfare, insofar as that is our goal. Same goes for planes.
France's high speed train network is powered by electricity which is primarily provided by it's nuclear energy power plants.
When viewing it through this lens then it becomes obvious trains have less climate impact.
If that is what you are optimising for then one is better than the other.
You have to choose some metric, this just seems to be the one they have chosen.
> If that is what you are optimising for then one is better than the other.
Yes, if the goal is to minimize climate impact at the expense of everything else, then this is logical, but that's not all that governments are supposed to care about.
If their analysis says something along the lines of "if we don't optimise for climate we all die" then I think it becomes pretty obvious what you optimise for.
However we don't have this information, we can only speculate.
Here are other than climate benefits:
Traffic is reduced in most cases (reducing infrastructure costs) (airports tend to not be in city center like train stations). Road use is decreased. Fuel imports are decreased. Noise and air pollution are decreased. Strike risks are likely decreased. Infrastructure costs at smaller airports is decreased.
Competition and end user costs are things that would be worse. (But France already have government granted monopolies for airports, trains, and airlines)
Not sure if you're trolling but a quick search finds that "rail travel accounts for 14 grams of CO2 emissions per passenger mile, which is dwarfed by the 285 grams generated by air travel, and the 158 grams per passenger miles from journeys in cars."
This isn't really a great argument. "Good regulation is bad actually, because if the opposite of the good regulation was done, that would be bad" isn't particularly coherent. This isn't a preference thing.