7 ms·
France bans short-haul flights to cut carbon emissions
- fulafel 3y agoElevating news, there's hope yet for reining in air travel emissions by more realistic means than pie in the sky tech solutions.
- Bostonian 3y agoBans are inefficient and coercive. It would be better to tax fuels according to the emissions they produce.
- jeffbee 3y agoWhy 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.
- kffcc 3y agoThey 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.
- skitout 3y ago"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...
- Bostonian 3y agoSuppose 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.
- fulafel 3y agoOnly 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.
- DirkH 3y agoProhibition 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.
- Turskarama 3y agoAre you suggesting there could be a black market for... flying? Seems unlikely to me.
- DirkH 3y agoNo, 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.
- clnq 3y agoFlying an airplane in a prohibited way is usually very evident though. Not so much with consumer sales/trade.
- belorn 3y agoA 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?
- version_five 3y agoThis 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.
- cvalka 3y agoTaxation > regulation
- ZeroGravitas 3y agoI'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.
- jbm 3y agoI 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.
- bsaul 3y agoI 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).
- ZeroGravitas 3y ago3-7x 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.
- bsaul 3y agoMy 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.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoFrance 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.
- bsaul 3y ago
- coolhand2120 3y agoSo 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.
- rjmunro 3y agoIn France, people take fully electric high speed (150-200mph trains.
- beezlewax 3y agoSpain also. Far nicer way to travel. Often faster when you account for travelling to and from the airport and air travel waiting times
- local_crmdgeon 3y agohttps://parisbytrain.com/tgv-map/ 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.
- collyw 3y agoWill it manage to handle the capacity of the air travel that is being removed?
- mahkeiro 3y agoA 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 ;)
- local_crmdgeon 3y agoAir 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_TGV_services Trains are really intense.
- danielfoster 3y agoEveryone 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.
- okeuro49 3y ago> Hopefully countries with poor rail infrastructure such as Germany do not adopt France’s approach. Germany does not have a poor rail infrastructure.
- chrisldgk 3y agoDepends 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.
- kazen44 3y agodon't forget that compared to france, germany has a far more distributed population density, This makes rails far harder to maintain.
- Bellend 3y agoDo 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?
- Turskarama 3y agoA 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.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago> 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?
- was_a_dev 3y agoExcept there wouldn't be any flights
- wcoenen 3y agoFlights 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-system-eu-ets_en https://climate.ec.europa.eu/eu-action/eu-emissions-trading-...
- fulafel 3y agoThis 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.
- wcoenen 3y ago> 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.
- antiquark 3y agoMeanwhile, China is building coal plants like there's no tomorrow... https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-six-times-more-new-coal-plants-than-other-countries-report-fin https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-...
- londgine 3y agoDoes this, like so many other climate related laws, have a private jet exemption?