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I don't really understand what the purpose of this tax is. There's no alternative to burning fuel by energy density on an airline, so why go after flights? What

I don't really understand what the purpose of this tax is. There's no alternative to burning fuel by energy density on an airline, so why go after flights? What do they expect them to do? If you're taxing petrol cars you'd expect electric cars to become more economically viable. Either way I disagree with carbon taxes. They're regressive, and ignore the fact that regular people are being badly hurt by them whereas the rich won't even feel it.

inflatableDodo 7y ago
>What do they expect them to do? Use trains.
- baud147258 7y ago
  Except that trains don't have the same possible destinations, you can't (easily) take a train to a destination outside EU. I think the gov went in the wrong direction here, the tax for flights within France should have been the highest, to give more incentives for using the train
  - inflatableDodo 7y ago
    >Except that trains don't have the same possible destinations I do not know of a commercial airport without a train station. There do however appear to be plenty of rail stations that do not have airports. >you can't (easily) take a train to a destination outside EU. Britain is about to test this theory. But also, that is nonsense. Passenger trains leave and enter the EU all the time.
    - baud147258 7y ago
      > I do not know of a commercial airport without a train station. Could you contact me when I would be able to buy a Paris-Tunis train ticket, please?
      - ceejayoz 7y ago
        There are ferries from Tunis to various spots in Italy, at which point you can likely hop on a train.
    - benj111 7y ago
      "I do not know of a commercial airport without a train station" Leeds Bradford One is planned to be built though.
    - sebazzz 7y ago
      > I do not know of a commercial airport without a train station. I went to a business trip from AMS (Schiphol) to WRO (Wroclaw). Wroclaw airport does not have any rail station (the nearest is a kilometer away). We had to take the shuttle bus to the train station in Wroclaw city centre. The train from AMS would probably have taken over a day. Excluding check-in and luggage drop-off, flying took less than two hours.
  - LargeWu 7y ago
    That's OK. Nobody is forcing you to take the train, you're just being expected to pay for the environmental costs of your decision to fly, should you choose to do so.
mattnewton 7y ago
I think they expect people to fly less; similar to many other “sin” taxes like those on alcohol or tobacco.
- skocznymroczny 7y ago
  What's the alternative to flying?
  - sbergot 7y ago
    Using a train.
    - joyjoyjoy 7y ago
      When was the last time you took a train from Paris to New York?
      - seszett 7y ago
        When was the last time you had no choice but to fly from Paris to New York? Not taking the flight at all can also be an option. If you really need to, well contributing 18 euros to support less polluting infrastructure such as trains is not that big a price to pay.
      - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
        > When was the last time you took a train from Paris to New York? Right after I sold my beachfront house in Arizona.
        benj111 7y ago
        Surely for the joke to work you'd have to suggest that sea levels were much lower, not higher. Eg: 'When I sold my Manhattan mountain lodge.'
        7y ago
Juliate 7y ago
Do you agree carbon emissions (among others) contribute significantly to warming? If not, conversation is indeed over and baseless. If yes, what alternative do we have help reduce carbon emissions in the atmosphere? (because this is something to do, and fast now)
- zdragnar 7y ago
  A pittance of a tax won't reduce carbon emissions. Depending on where it goes, it might maybe make other means of transportation a bit nicer. To actively reduce carbon emissions, you'd have to actually make the cost of a short flight much more expensive. Also, since not all flights can be replaced with lower emission travels (long, intercontinental flights), you'd have to tax them out to the point that people simply stop coming to Europe. You might maybe get a half of a percentage of global CO2 emissions cut that way. Maybe. In either case, the current growth rate of emissions far eclipses that, so it is at best virtue signalling. At worst, you are punishing poor people for being too poor to afford the high rates, while at the same time bringing in less tax revenue because only a few rich people are flying.
hrktb 7y ago
The purpose of the tax is to recover the external cost of flying. Ideally there are alternatives to flying, but it's not a requirement: as long as flying has an environmental price, recovering it through tax is a decent logic. We can discuss the offered price, or how the tax could be structured, but I don't think the approach is unreasonable on its face.
- flexie 7y ago
  But close to nothing is being recovered. We would recover more or less the same if we introduced a tax on bad weather to be paid by those suffering from it. The money collected with this tax may or may not reduce air travel and will be spent on government employees, welfare distributions, healthcare, roads, military etc as all other taxes and only a fraction will be spent on improving the environment.
  - bryanlarsen 7y ago
    They could destroy the money collected from the tax and it would still improve the environment: the tax will discourage people from flying and encourage people to use alternatives, which helps the environment.
    - hedora 7y ago
      As I write this, I imagine people are rushing to their phones to cancel their transatlantic business class tickets because of the 18 euro surcharge. I’ll be traveling via barge for the foreseeable future because of this tax.
      - skosch 7y ago
        All of this has been studied and modeled extensively. It's called elasticity of demand. The fact that professional trading firms are selling airline stock, pushing the price down, shows you that yes, this will indeed have an effect.
        7y ago
dawhizkid 7y ago
Business class taxes are 3x-6x economy, so corporations/rich people are paying more. Flying as is is a luxury, economy class or not, and we shouldn't forget that.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  Value added taxes sure, but this is a flat head tax, I don’t think biz class is going to be charged more than economy class.
  - magduf 7y ago
    It says right there in the article that business class will be charged more than economy.
    - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
      Sorry yes. The article says 18 euros is the cap for business international, not the starting point. This is still very small potatoes when a business class ticket isn’t going for less than $3k. Interesting that they are also not taxing transits, meaning if you just transfer through CDG, you aren’t paying the tax.
      - dawhizkid 7y ago
        And a 3 euro flat tax for economy is small potatoes too. The original argument was that this would really hurt the poor. My counterargument was that flying is still a luxury, and the poor do not fly or fly frequently enough where this would actually be devastating to them. If anything the tax is too small to change anyone's behavior.
        magduf 7y ago
        They're probably trying to make sure they don't charge so much that flying out of France becomes more expensive than some nearby city in a bordering country. But even so, these taxes are very, very low. Honestly, I wouldn't mind paying 10 Euros on a flight if I knew it was helping rail systems. It's cheaper than the stupid "convenience fee" that I have to pay for concert tickets.
benj111 7y ago
Why is it regressive? You don't need to fly in western Europe, and anyway the charge increases for more expensive classes. I'm not even sure that carbon taxes overall are regressive. Can't afford a car? Your transport is lower carbon. Drive a small car because you cant afford a large one? Your transport is lower carbon. Cant afford air con, cant afford heating, a new phone every year... Yes there are edge cases, not being able to afford insulation, an energy efficient fridge or car or whatever but I would guess your average poor person has a lower carbon footprint than your average rich person.
tin7in 7y ago
> There's no alternative to burning fuel by energy density on an airline, so why go after flights? It is still very early but there are projects working on electric flight.
- VBprogrammer 7y ago
  I don't believe there is technology even on the horizon which would make this remotely feasible. The best of electric aircraft at the moment can fly for 90 minutes carrying two people; allegedly aimed at the flight training market. Except that gives it about enough endurance for a single lesson and it'd then need to be recharged for 3-4 hours before it could fly again. Compare this to a Rotax powered trainer which burns ~15 litres of fuel an hour and can be refuelled in 5 minutes.
  - 0xffff2 7y ago
    You are correct. There are people working on this, but the best estimates I've seen are that hybrid-electric airliners are ~30-40 years from commercialization and fully electric simply isn't feasible without a fundamental breakthrough in the battery energy-density space.
    - VBprogrammer 7y ago
      Even hybrids only make sense to me in the context of aircraft having the ability to taxi using electric motors, only starting their engines at the holding point (turbine engines burn a significant amount of fuel even at idle). I believe Airbus have a patent on this idea. Otherwise turbine engines are run close to their designed maximum continuous thrust for the majority of a flight. It's not like a car where they only need ~20% of their maximum power in cruise.
      - 0xffff2 7y ago
        I'm not an aerospace engineer, so I can only repeat what I've seen in presentations. (I'm a software engineer at an aerospace research organization.) One specific area that I recall being investigated is the ability to decouple power and thrust. That is, convert some of the power generated by the existing turbines into electricity and use that to drive an electric fan in (a) non-traditional location(s). This can have complex aerodynamic interactions that I don't really understand in detail, but the take-away is that it can reduce drag and thus overall energy required for a given flight.
Scoundreller 7y ago
> they’re regressive Nothing a cheque can’t solve. And by taxing carbon, you get the added benefit of reducing some other tax, like the regressive nature of income taxes (ie: taxing people that have to work because they didn’t inherit/afford capital assets)
simias 7y ago
I took a plane from Lisbon to Paris for 35 euros last week. That feels incredibly cheap to me, especially compared to high-speed train. I routinely pay twice as much to get not even half as far by TGV. Making train more competitive by taxing planes more might not be a terrible idea. I say might because I can't pretend to even begin to understand all the implications of this tax but hopefully whoever came up with it did...
- pmontra 7y ago
  On distances like Lisbom to Paris trains can't compete on time, not only on price. There is no way a train can be made faster with the current technology (hyperloop: let's wait and see.) I think nobody goes from Lisbon to Paris and back by train to spend a weekend there. Of course if flying costs more people will fly less.
  - gdhbcc 7y ago
    Portugal is generally not connected by train anywhere else. Last I checked we didn't even have more than one or 2 routes to Spain by train, due to different gauges, and spain has different gauges from france. If you want to go from Paris to Lisbon by train expect a whole day of travel if not more, with multiple changes
    - simias 7y ago
      Hopefully if planes become more expensive we'll see some investments in the train infrastructure. Going from Lisbon to Paris even without changes will probably still take a long time even with a bullet train but if I can schedule a trip by night and sleep reasonably comfortably I think I'd consider it over the plane. Catching a train in the late afternoon in the center of Lisbon, working for a few hours, sleeping and waking up in the center of Paris sounds fairly pleasant to me. Of course at the moment that's effectively science fiction.
csomar 7y ago
> I don't really understand what the purpose of this tax is. They tried taxing Diesel but it didn't work out. The people started to revolt. Now they turned to airplanes which has a much timid audience. Gotta find some way to finance that lavish bureaucratic lifestyle.
skosch 7y ago
Carbon taxes are the most efficient way to let the market work out technical solutions to the climate crisis. Period. If you're worried about regressive taxation, check out the fee-and-dividend model, where all revenue is returned to households [0]. This means that for most "regular" people, the carbon tax is actually a tax credit – because most of the pollution is caused by the excessive consumption by rich households. There is actually a bill before the House now that has a non-zero chance of passing. [0] https://citizensclimatelobby.org/carbon-fee-and-dividend/ https://citizensclimatelobby.org/carbon-fee-and-dividend/
allemagne 7y ago
A general carbon tax should absolutely be paired with a dividend of some kind to offset its effect on the poor. However consumption patterns by everyone needs to change en masse, and a carbon tax across the board is a no-brainer to adjust individual incentives to achieve this.
leetcrew 7y ago
> They're regressive, and ignore the fact that regular people are being badly hurt by them whereas the rich won't even feel it. how many people actually need to fly outside of traveling for work? in America, a high tax on gasoline would actually be devastating to the livelihood of a lot of poor citizens. being priced out of frequent air travel doesn't sound like a massive hardship.
- kumoflow 7y ago
  I am in Europe. Travel between Porto and Faro (Portugal) by train is 5 hours versus 50 minutes by plane (ok, plus one for security) and 2-5 times as expensive. During the last 2 years I was doing this flight pretty much twice a week. It was the only way I could spend time with my kid, but still keep my job and work to support him. I also travel for work longer distances (NY, San Francisco and all over Europe) once or twice a month (which I try to match with my trips to see my son). Lets instead tax all the iPhone Xr and Pixel whatevers. Laptops as well. They all contribute to the shitty environment (rare materials, plastics, shipping, polluting assembling them). This is the problem I see with pretty much every cause. > I don't see why X or Y is needed (because I don't needed it), so everyone else is selfish and ruining the environment, but what they think is essential (new shiny gadgets, brand clothes done by kids in Asia, etc) are always forgotten.
  - leetcrew 7y ago
    first of all, no one is talking about banning air travel or anything like that. the tax being discussed is only 1.5 euros for non-business class flights within the EU. this doesn't actually come close to offsetting the CO2 produced by you flying from Porto to Faro one way (according to this calculator [0]). you have a special case with your son, but most people don't need to fly outside of work. if you can already afford to fly twice a week, my guess is you can also afford another twelve euros per month to offset a fraction of the damage. if your employer really needs you to travel, I'm sure they will find a way to come up with an extra eighteen euros. > I don't see why X or Y is needed (because I don't needed it), so everyone else is selfish and ruining the environment, but what they think is essential (new shiny gadgets, brand clothes done by kids in Asia, etc) are always forgotten. I do agree with you here. what we need is a fair taxation scheme to offset all environmental damage. just make a list: how much does it cost to undo the damage of one flight, one ipad, etc. then you let people buy what they want, but make them pay to fix the environmental damage. when the price reflects the true cost, people will figure out what they actually need and budget accordingly. there will be some things (cars in rural areas are an obvious example) where it will simply be too damaging to the poor to fully tax immediately, but most people will find that there's a lot of stuff they can reduce their consumption of. [0] https://co2.myclimate.org/en/flight_calculators/new https://co2.myclimate.org/en/flight_calculators/new
WhompingWindows 7y ago
Carbon taxes are not inherently regressive, that's simply false. What do you DO with the taxes, that's what makes them progressive or regressive. If you rebate the taxes to the people, they become PROgressive, as the rich are much more likely to have higher carbon footprints.
karlp 7y ago
It's a 3€ tax on a flight, those regular people are not being "badly hurt".
novaRom 7y ago
>> There's no alternative to burning fuel by energy density on an airline This initiative makes trains more competitive. Trains are greener and often quicker especially for intra-european continental routes.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  Then why not take revenue from this tax and put it into train subsidies? I don't see that happening.
- kumoflow 7y ago
  Greener ok, but quicker? Even if you account for the security issues, I never had a plane in Europe being quicker than the plane (with all the overhead). In most cases is double or triple the time (for shorter distances) or close to impossible for longer ones.
  - novaRom 7y ago
    Flight: 1) You have to appear at least 1.5 hour before departure (luggage drop, security checks) 2) You have to drive to an airport and back, might take hours in some cases unless you live close enough (in a big city), but it will usually take not less than 30-50 mins one way 3) It takes up to 30 minutes to get luggage after landing Rail: a) Train stations are in the centers of cities; max 10-15 mins by subway or bus/tram; high-speed trains also stop in many mid-size cities/towns b) You can appear just at departure time
gdubs 7y ago
There’s nothing inherent to carbon taxes that need to be regressive. E.g., you can provide a dividend or set of benefits from the funds that disproportionately favors the poor. But not taxing carbon is also “regressive”, in that climate change will disproportionately hurt the world’s poorest.
mac01021 7y ago
> They're regressive. Maybe not. Firstly, it depends what is done with the proceeds. A fee and dividend system that redistributes the proceeds among all citizens can be made as progressive as you want, depending on the policy for sizing everyone's dividend. Second,even if the dividend is an equal dollar amount for every citizen, the average person is made more than whole bythe dividend, while most wealthy individuals who have larger homes,engage in more air travel, buy new cars more frequently, etc will fund a disproportionately large fraction of the proceeds.
eloisant 7y ago
The purpose of this tax is to get some revenue while making it look like they care about global warming.
pimmen 7y ago
You can have a kickback, like Canada. Basically, you pay the carbon tax as a middle class person and then you get a decent amount of money back from the government to cover the damages, and everyone gets up to the same amount (which is like a thousand bucks or something). So, it becomes no biggy for a middle class family who took one flight during the past three years, but a celebrity who flies around with his private jet multiple times a week will feel the pinch.
IkmoIkmo 7y ago
Seems pretty clear to me? Flying is bad for the environment, spectacularly so. The alternative is not necessarily: flying without burning fuel. But rather: not flying. And that isn't that big of a problem. We have many alternatives to flying, e.g. a high-speed rail system that has a 10x smaller impact. Of course you want to steer consumers towards that with incentives like these. Earnings from these taxes don't just disappear in a black hole. They're redistributed. Perhaps to make train travel cheaper and more economically viable. Perhaps electric cars. Given the socioeconomic groups that most frequently use public transport vs air travel, this tax seems progressive, not regressive, if anything. And that's only one alternative to flying: other forms of travel. Another is simply not travelling at all. There's a reason people don't choose to live 20 hours away from work, or choose to have a daily hobby in another country, or choose to visit friends across the world on a daily basis, because there's a cost to travel. A cost that is too high. And that's okay. Not all travel has to happen, not all travel is important enough to pay the cost. May seem silly, but if we could teleport around the world for $1, with hypothetically insane costs to the environment, you'd have massive amounts of unnecessary travel. And the right response would be as a society that we could do without much of this unnecessary travel entirely, replace it with viable alternatives to proximity like a phonecall, a skype call, a text message, a picture etc. And we can do this by making it more expensive, and using that money to make low-impact alternatives (relatively) cheaper. If you know that as a society we're destroying our environment and the current cost of doing so is too cheap, or the destruction is not factored in to the price, the most reasonable solution is to increase the cost.

inflatableDodo 7y ago

>What do they expect them to do? Use trains.

baud147258 7y ago
Except that trains don't have the same possible destinations, you can't (easily) take a train to a destination outside EU. I think the gov went in the wrong direction here, the tax for flights within France should have been the highest, to give more incentives for using the train
- inflatableDodo 7y ago
  >Except that trains don't have the same possible destinations I do not know of a commercial airport without a train station. There do however appear to be plenty of rail stations that do not have airports. >you can't (easily) take a train to a destination outside EU. Britain is about to test this theory. But also, that is nonsense. Passenger trains leave and enter the EU all the time.
  - baud147258 7y ago
    > I do not know of a commercial airport without a train station. Could you contact me when I would be able to buy a Paris-Tunis train ticket, please?
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      There are ferries from Tunis to various spots in Italy, at which point you can likely hop on a train.
  - benj111 7y ago
    "I do not know of a commercial airport without a train station" Leeds Bradford One is planned to be built though.
  - sebazzz 7y ago
    > I do not know of a commercial airport without a train station. I went to a business trip from AMS (Schiphol) to WRO (Wroclaw). Wroclaw airport does not have any rail station (the nearest is a kilometer away). We had to take the shuttle bus to the train station in Wroclaw city centre. The train from AMS would probably have taken over a day. Excluding check-in and luggage drop-off, flying took less than two hours.
- LargeWu 7y ago
  That's OK. Nobody is forcing you to take the train, you're just being expected to pay for the environmental costs of your decision to fly, should you choose to do so.

mattnewton 7y ago

I think they expect people to fly less; similar to many other “sin” taxes like those on alcohol or tobacco.

skocznymroczny 7y ago
What's the alternative to flying?
- sbergot 7y ago
  Using a train.
  - joyjoyjoy 7y ago
    When was the last time you took a train from Paris to New York?
    - seszett 7y ago
      When was the last time you had no choice but to fly from Paris to New York? Not taking the flight at all can also be an option. If you really need to, well contributing 18 euros to support less polluting infrastructure such as trains is not that big a price to pay.
    - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      > When was the last time you took a train from Paris to New York? Right after I sold my beachfront house in Arizona.
      - benj111 7y ago
        Surely for the joke to work you'd have to suggest that sea levels were much lower, not higher. Eg: 'When I sold my Manhattan mountain lodge.'
        7y ago

Juliate 7y ago

Do you agree carbon emissions (among others) contribute significantly to warming? If not, conversation is indeed over and baseless. If yes, what alternative do we have help reduce carbon emissions in the atmosphere? (because this is something to do, and fast now)

zdragnar 7y ago
A pittance of a tax won't reduce carbon emissions. Depending on where it goes, it might maybe make other means of transportation a bit nicer. To actively reduce carbon emissions, you'd have to actually make the cost of a short flight much more expensive. Also, since not all flights can be replaced with lower emission travels (long, intercontinental flights), you'd have to tax them out to the point that people simply stop coming to Europe. You might maybe get a half of a percentage of global CO2 emissions cut that way. Maybe. In either case, the current growth rate of emissions far eclipses that, so it is at best virtue signalling. At worst, you are punishing poor people for being too poor to afford the high rates, while at the same time bringing in less tax revenue because only a few rich people are flying.

hrktb 7y ago

The purpose of the tax is to recover the external cost of flying. Ideally there are alternatives to flying, but it's not a requirement: as long as flying has an environmental price, recovering it through tax is a decent logic. We can discuss the offered price, or how the tax could be structured, but I don't think the approach is unreasonable on its face.

flexie 7y ago
But close to nothing is being recovered. We would recover more or less the same if we introduced a tax on bad weather to be paid by those suffering from it. The money collected with this tax may or may not reduce air travel and will be spent on government employees, welfare distributions, healthcare, roads, military etc as all other taxes and only a fraction will be spent on improving the environment.
- bryanlarsen 7y ago
  They could destroy the money collected from the tax and it would still improve the environment: the tax will discourage people from flying and encourage people to use alternatives, which helps the environment.
  - hedora 7y ago
    As I write this, I imagine people are rushing to their phones to cancel their transatlantic business class tickets because of the 18 euro surcharge. I’ll be traveling via barge for the foreseeable future because of this tax.
    - skosch 7y ago
      All of this has been studied and modeled extensively. It's called elasticity of demand. The fact that professional trading firms are selling airline stock, pushing the price down, shows you that yes, this will indeed have an effect.
      - 7y ago

dawhizkid 7y ago

Business class taxes are 3x-6x economy, so corporations/rich people are paying more. Flying as is is a luxury, economy class or not, and we shouldn't forget that.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
seanmcdirmid 7y ago
Value added taxes sure, but this is a flat head tax, I don’t think biz class is going to be charged more than economy class.
- magduf 7y ago
  It says right there in the article that business class will be charged more than economy.
  - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    Sorry yes. The article says 18 euros is the cap for business international, not the starting point. This is still very small potatoes when a business class ticket isn’t going for less than $3k. Interesting that they are also not taxing transits, meaning if you just transfer through CDG, you aren’t paying the tax.
    - dawhizkid 7y ago
      And a 3 euro flat tax for economy is small potatoes too. The original argument was that this would really hurt the poor. My counterargument was that flying is still a luxury, and the poor do not fly or fly frequently enough where this would actually be devastating to them. If anything the tax is too small to change anyone's behavior.
      - magduf 7y ago
        They're probably trying to make sure they don't charge so much that flying out of France becomes more expensive than some nearby city in a bordering country. But even so, these taxes are very, very low. Honestly, I wouldn't mind paying 10 Euros on a flight if I knew it was helping rail systems. It's cheaper than the stupid "convenience fee" that I have to pay for concert tickets.

benj111 7y ago

Why is it regressive? You don't need to fly in western Europe, and anyway the charge increases for more expensive classes. I'm not even sure that carbon taxes overall are regressive. Can't afford a car? Your transport is lower carbon. Drive a small car because you cant afford a large one? Your transport is lower carbon. Cant afford air con, cant afford heating, a new phone every year... Yes there are edge cases, not being able to afford insulation, an energy efficient fridge or car or whatever but I would guess your average poor person has a lower carbon footprint than your average rich person.

tin7in 7y ago

> There's no alternative to burning fuel by energy density on an airline, so why go after flights? It is still very early but there are projects working on electric flight.

VBprogrammer 7y ago
I don't believe there is technology even on the horizon which would make this remotely feasible. The best of electric aircraft at the moment can fly for 90 minutes carrying two people; allegedly aimed at the flight training market. Except that gives it about enough endurance for a single lesson and it'd then need to be recharged for 3-4 hours before it could fly again. Compare this to a Rotax powered trainer which burns ~15 litres of fuel an hour and can be refuelled in 5 minutes.
- 0xffff2 7y ago
  You are correct. There are people working on this, but the best estimates I've seen are that hybrid-electric airliners are ~30-40 years from commercialization and fully electric simply isn't feasible without a fundamental breakthrough in the battery energy-density space.
  - VBprogrammer 7y ago
    Even hybrids only make sense to me in the context of aircraft having the ability to taxi using electric motors, only starting their engines at the holding point (turbine engines burn a significant amount of fuel even at idle). I believe Airbus have a patent on this idea. Otherwise turbine engines are run close to their designed maximum continuous thrust for the majority of a flight. It's not like a car where they only need ~20% of their maximum power in cruise.
    - 0xffff2 7y ago
      I'm not an aerospace engineer, so I can only repeat what I've seen in presentations. (I'm a software engineer at an aerospace research organization.) One specific area that I recall being investigated is the ability to decouple power and thrust. That is, convert some of the power generated by the existing turbines into electricity and use that to drive an electric fan in (a) non-traditional location(s). This can have complex aerodynamic interactions that I don't really understand in detail, but the take-away is that it can reduce drag and thus overall energy required for a given flight.

Scoundreller 7y ago

> they’re regressive Nothing a cheque can’t solve. And by taxing carbon, you get the added benefit of reducing some other tax, like the regressive nature of income taxes (ie: taxing people that have to work because they didn’t inherit/afford capital assets)

simias 7y ago

I took a plane from Lisbon to Paris for 35 euros last week. That feels incredibly cheap to me, especially compared to high-speed train. I routinely pay twice as much to get not even half as far by TGV. Making train more competitive by taxing planes more might not be a terrible idea. I say might because I can't pretend to even begin to understand all the implications of this tax but hopefully whoever came up with it did...

pmontra 7y ago
On distances like Lisbom to Paris trains can't compete on time, not only on price. There is no way a train can be made faster with the current technology (hyperloop: let's wait and see.) I think nobody goes from Lisbon to Paris and back by train to spend a weekend there. Of course if flying costs more people will fly less.
- gdhbcc 7y ago
  Portugal is generally not connected by train anywhere else. Last I checked we didn't even have more than one or 2 routes to Spain by train, due to different gauges, and spain has different gauges from france. If you want to go from Paris to Lisbon by train expect a whole day of travel if not more, with multiple changes
  - simias 7y ago
    Hopefully if planes become more expensive we'll see some investments in the train infrastructure. Going from Lisbon to Paris even without changes will probably still take a long time even with a bullet train but if I can schedule a trip by night and sleep reasonably comfortably I think I'd consider it over the plane. Catching a train in the late afternoon in the center of Lisbon, working for a few hours, sleeping and waking up in the center of Paris sounds fairly pleasant to me. Of course at the moment that's effectively science fiction.

csomar 7y ago

> I don't really understand what the purpose of this tax is. They tried taxing Diesel but it didn't work out. The people started to revolt. Now they turned to airplanes which has a much timid audience. Gotta find some way to finance that lavish bureaucratic lifestyle.

skosch 7y ago

Carbon taxes are the most efficient way to let the market work out technical solutions to the climate crisis. Period. If you're worried about regressive taxation, check out the fee-and-dividend model, where all revenue is returned to households [0]. This means that for most "regular" people, the carbon tax is actually a tax credit – because most of the pollution is caused by the excessive consumption by rich households. There is actually a bill before the House now that has a non-zero chance of passing. [0] https://citizensclimatelobby.org/carbon-fee-and-dividend/ https://citizensclimatelobby.org/carbon-fee-and-dividend/

allemagne 7y ago

A general carbon tax should absolutely be paired with a dividend of some kind to offset its effect on the poor. However consumption patterns by everyone needs to change en masse, and a carbon tax across the board is a no-brainer to adjust individual incentives to achieve this.

leetcrew 7y ago

> They're regressive, and ignore the fact that regular people are being badly hurt by them whereas the rich won't even feel it. how many people actually need to fly outside of traveling for work? in America, a high tax on gasoline would actually be devastating to the livelihood of a lot of poor citizens. being priced out of frequent air travel doesn't sound like a massive hardship.

kumoflow 7y ago
I am in Europe. Travel between Porto and Faro (Portugal) by train is 5 hours versus 50 minutes by plane (ok, plus one for security) and 2-5 times as expensive. During the last 2 years I was doing this flight pretty much twice a week. It was the only way I could spend time with my kid, but still keep my job and work to support him. I also travel for work longer distances (NY, San Francisco and all over Europe) once or twice a month (which I try to match with my trips to see my son). Lets instead tax all the iPhone Xr and Pixel whatevers. Laptops as well. They all contribute to the shitty environment (rare materials, plastics, shipping, polluting assembling them). This is the problem I see with pretty much every cause. > I don't see why X or Y is needed (because I don't needed it), so everyone else is selfish and ruining the environment, but what they think is essential (new shiny gadgets, brand clothes done by kids in Asia, etc) are always forgotten.
- leetcrew 7y ago
  first of all, no one is talking about banning air travel or anything like that. the tax being discussed is only 1.5 euros for non-business class flights within the EU. this doesn't actually come close to offsetting the CO2 produced by you flying from Porto to Faro one way (according to this calculator [0]). you have a special case with your son, but most people don't need to fly outside of work. if you can already afford to fly twice a week, my guess is you can also afford another twelve euros per month to offset a fraction of the damage. if your employer really needs you to travel, I'm sure they will find a way to come up with an extra eighteen euros. > I don't see why X or Y is needed (because I don't needed it), so everyone else is selfish and ruining the environment, but what they think is essential (new shiny gadgets, brand clothes done by kids in Asia, etc) are always forgotten. I do agree with you here. what we need is a fair taxation scheme to offset all environmental damage. just make a list: how much does it cost to undo the damage of one flight, one ipad, etc. then you let people buy what they want, but make them pay to fix the environmental damage. when the price reflects the true cost, people will figure out what they actually need and budget accordingly. there will be some things (cars in rural areas are an obvious example) where it will simply be too damaging to the poor to fully tax immediately, but most people will find that there's a lot of stuff they can reduce their consumption of. [0] https://co2.myclimate.org/en/flight_calculators/new https://co2.myclimate.org/en/flight_calculators/new

WhompingWindows 7y ago

Carbon taxes are not inherently regressive, that's simply false. What do you DO with the taxes, that's what makes them progressive or regressive. If you rebate the taxes to the people, they become PROgressive, as the rich are much more likely to have higher carbon footprints.

karlp 7y ago

It's a 3€ tax on a flight, those regular people are not being "badly hurt".

novaRom 7y ago

>> There's no alternative to burning fuel by energy density on an airline This initiative makes trains more competitive. Trains are greener and often quicker especially for intra-european continental routes.

cameronbrown 7y ago
Then why not take revenue from this tax and put it into train subsidies? I don't see that happening.
kumoflow 7y ago
Greener ok, but quicker? Even if you account for the security issues, I never had a plane in Europe being quicker than the plane (with all the overhead). In most cases is double or triple the time (for shorter distances) or close to impossible for longer ones.
- novaRom 7y ago
  Flight: 1) You have to appear at least 1.5 hour before departure (luggage drop, security checks) 2) You have to drive to an airport and back, might take hours in some cases unless you live close enough (in a big city), but it will usually take not less than 30-50 mins one way 3) It takes up to 30 minutes to get luggage after landing Rail: a) Train stations are in the centers of cities; max 10-15 mins by subway or bus/tram; high-speed trains also stop in many mid-size cities/towns b) You can appear just at departure time

gdubs 7y ago

There’s nothing inherent to carbon taxes that need to be regressive. E.g., you can provide a dividend or set of benefits from the funds that disproportionately favors the poor. But not taxing carbon is also “regressive”, in that climate change will disproportionately hurt the world’s poorest.

mac01021 7y ago

> They're regressive. Maybe not. Firstly, it depends what is done with the proceeds. A fee and dividend system that redistributes the proceeds among all citizens can be made as progressive as you want, depending on the policy for sizing everyone's dividend. Second,even if the dividend is an equal dollar amount for every citizen, the average person is made more than whole bythe dividend, while most wealthy individuals who have larger homes,engage in more air travel, buy new cars more frequently, etc will fund a disproportionately large fraction of the proceeds.

eloisant 7y ago

The purpose of this tax is to get some revenue while making it look like they care about global warming.

pimmen 7y ago

You can have a kickback, like Canada. Basically, you pay the carbon tax as a middle class person and then you get a decent amount of money back from the government to cover the damages, and everyone gets up to the same amount (which is like a thousand bucks or something). So, it becomes no biggy for a middle class family who took one flight during the past three years, but a celebrity who flies around with his private jet multiple times a week will feel the pinch.

IkmoIkmo 7y ago

Seems pretty clear to me? Flying is bad for the environment, spectacularly so. The alternative is not necessarily: flying without burning fuel. But rather: not flying. And that isn't that big of a problem. We have many alternatives to flying, e.g. a high-speed rail system that has a 10x smaller impact. Of course you want to steer consumers towards that with incentives like these. Earnings from these taxes don't just disappear in a black hole. They're redistributed. Perhaps to make train travel cheaper and more economically viable. Perhaps electric cars. Given the socioeconomic groups that most frequently use public transport vs air travel, this tax seems progressive, not regressive, if anything. And that's only one alternative to flying: other forms of travel. Another is simply not travelling at all. There's a reason people don't choose to live 20 hours away from work, or choose to have a daily hobby in another country, or choose to visit friends across the world on a daily basis, because there's a cost to travel. A cost that is too high. And that's okay. Not all travel has to happen, not all travel is important enough to pay the cost. May seem silly, but if we could teleport around the world for $1, with hypothetically insane costs to the environment, you'd have massive amounts of unnecessary travel. And the right response would be as a society that we could do without much of this unnecessary travel entirely, replace it with viable alternatives to proximity like a phonecall, a skype call, a text message, a picture etc. And we can do this by making it more expensive, and using that money to make low-impact alternatives (relatively) cheaper. If you know that as a society we're destroying our environment and the current cost of doing so is too cheap, or the destruction is not factored in to the price, the most reasonable solution is to increase the cost.