Instead of trying to lower prices for alternatives (e.g. trains), they just try to jack up prices for existing forms of transport, so that the other transports now seem cheaper. How about taxing the shit out of airlines and using that to get trains down to the price of what airlines charge now?
This is just again getting the mid- and low-income layers to pay for shit.
“I openly call for taxing polluting activities to invest in the ecological transition,” said Beaune, adding that the government plans to increase the tax on flights departing France to fund rail investments.
I don’t think it’s entirely clear what he wants the EU to do, but it really seems like making other forms of transport cheaper is part the goal here.
Hence I think it’s likely going to be a reasonable proposal. Making flights more expensive to pay for cheaper trains is a good way to go about it. The money for the trains to come from somewhere and flights are something people can live without.
Yes, if it is done in the right order. Make trains cheaper first, then add to the cost of airlines. Knowing politics it will be “We will now tax flights with an additonal X% and use that for alternative travels”. Then, 10 years later, the “alternative travels” will be the same price but flying will be more expensive. I just do not trust politics anymore at all if they do not put the “lowering costs” part first.
Make trains cheaper first, then add to the cost of airlines.
Then you have a gap regarding financing. I.e. also a problem. Hence I really don’t care about the order here. Both trains becoming cheaper and plains becoming more expensive are things that need to happen asap. I would prefer both to happen tomorrow, but if one happens later or not all all that’s still better than nothing happening.
Yes, and that gap in financing will make them haul their asses. As they now have to get the money and have already given the benefit out. And for the meantime, they can probably scrape together money from a few other places. Maybe a road will get delayed for a year or something.
Who do you think they will pass on those costs? Basically all Airlines make their money on normal tickets and not on the class 1 tickets. What you really want are instead of 0% tax on Airplaine fuel, ridiculous taxes. That actually increases the COSTS of airlines and those do get passed on more to the rich as they travel a lot more inefficiently. They also can’t evade costs, but they can taxes.
You might be misunderstanding my comment: They can increase costs if they want, but they should take the costs away elsewhere. I have no problem with a train ticket being 10€ and a plane ticket being 120€ instead of the other way around.
But this will lead to a plane ticket being (as an example) 80€ and the train ticket continuing to be 120€. While they do make more money off of 1st class and stuff, they still need to make a chunk of the cost off of 2nd class. Especially on more local (e.g. inside the country or just one over), where there often is just one class in the plane (And maybe there is business).
So you want to price more people out of living good lives and being able to travel? What percentage of people do you want to be too poor to have a holiday?
the carbon tax for one kg should be set at 110% the cost to remove one kg, 100% to completely remove it, and 10% to help remove past emissions, which statistically the emitter probably emitted pre-tax anyways
The problem is that for fossil fuels, there is no good way to “completely remove” them. Most of the “carbon neutral” ads are plain greenwashing. But taxing it would be a good step nonetheless.
From what we know about physics and chemistry so far, it looks like there is no magical way to reverse this, that wouldn’t require a huge amount of energy, resources and effort. Also, it’s a bit to late to put money into research now. We know what to to do and how to “fix” things but we don’t like the consequences so we (mostly) keep going as if nothing is wrong.
Carbon capturing is certainly possible. It isn’t worth it economically yet. Further research should make it cheaper. Meanwhile we will (hopefully) increase the CO2 tax. At some point it becomes economically worthwhile and companies will emerge to earn that money.
I didn’t say it’s not possible. I said it’s not possible to undo what we’ve done and what we’re still doing. It won’t be fixed by removing the excessive CO2 from the atmosphere. Besides, I also think that it’s not feasible at the required scale.
Most of the “carbon neutral” ads are plain greenwashing.
Well, there’s some issues with carbon offsetting and the promises made by the involved companies. But that’s more of a regulatory issue.
For now you can indeed offset your emissions very cheaply by paying NGOs like atmosfair (i.e. one of the NGOs that has working programs). What they do is finding issues where emissions can be avoided cheaply and then funding projects to avoid these emissions. Obviously, that wouldn’t work if everyone (or even a large enough share) of people tried to offset their emissions, but right now and at the margin is a very efficient way to decrease emissions. Hence I wouldn’t be too critical of it. Offsetting won’t safe us in the long run, but it will buy us some time to implement sustainable solutions.
I don’t know the details but how you describe it, it sounds like it doesn’t reduce the emissions but shift them from one piece of paper to another one. Isn’t that still exactly greenwashing? I pay someone to make a 3rd party reduce their emissions so that I can fill that gap again.
I pay someone to make a 3rd party reduce their emissions so that I can fill that gap again.
If you do that, sure, then we have a problem. But so do you, since you may end up in jail. If you call a product carbon neutral in your advertising, you’ll need to have a reason to believe that all emissions from that product were offset, otherwise you’re guilty of fraud. So - in the context of that product - there’s no legal way to start emissions again. Obviously in practice there’s a lot of wiggle room regarding what emissions can be attributed to your product and how well the offset works and you’ll have in dubio pro reo on your side, but in principle offsetting actually erases the entire carbon footprint of a product.
We’re not speaking about emission rights here. In those cases, yes, shifting them from one entity to another doesn’t directly decrease emissions but it still helps since it makes emissions more expensive and therefore leads to companies looking for ways to avoid them.
Edit: The 3rd parties in case of emission offsetting don’t tend to be limited by emission rights. We’re talking about thing like giving solar cookers to farmers in the developing word. That example these people an option to avoid using coal and helps with the climate, but it also helps them avoid the health problems that come with coal fires.
You do not have linear costs of removal. Just letting nature be has no additional costs, but in the amount necessary extreme opportunity costs.
Technical systems might have a theoretical cost, but practically any energy put into removing CO2 from the atmosphere is much better put into not using fossil fuels to produce energy for a different purpose.
Meanwhile the cost estimates for the damages incurred are in regions of 200-500 €/tonne now. So unless we also properly tax imports and other countries also do carbon taxing, it will be the death to any industry.
An increasing carbon tax is an important instrument, but it can only be part of many measures, most importantly ramping up the renewable production by all means.
We have the largest emission trading scheme in the world in the EU and it is actually working. The issue is that there are no taxes on international flights nor on kerosine. So flying is made artifically cheaper. That alone basicly would solve the problem.
The other big problem is that train tickets are not generally accepted across EU borders. That is a massive problem if one of your trains is delayed and you miss a connection due to that. You end up not being able to take an alternative train for free and do not get paid the normal fine from the train operator for long delays. There is some cooperation, so this is not the case for all international journeys, but still it is a problem.
Unfortunately the train routes from the Netherlands to, say, Portugal, Spain, Italy, or eastern Europe are not well developed enough yet. The train is great in the directions of Paris, Frankfurt, Berlin, and London, but beyond that it often takes longer than flying and often requires multiple tickets
You just describe when it’s convenient not when anyone needs to fly. With the same reasoning everyone needs to use a car for everything outside a 500m radius because it’s faster than going by bike.
I’m not just talking about faster. Over long distances flying is often almost an order of magnitude faster, significantly cheaper, more reliable (trans-continental rail journeys often involve tricky connections between different rail carriers), and much easier to book (for example, try booking a flight between Amsterdam and Bucharest, and then a train ticket). There are some connections where rail makes sense right now, but definitely not all connections.
Airlines are also obligated to pay compensation if their flights are delayed, railway companies are too under certain circumstances but the amounts are far lower and this doesn’t cover separate tickets, which are often needed to travel on these very long railway journeys.
But I think we’re in agreement that it shouldn’t be this way. In situations where taking the train takes merely 2x as long as flying instead of 10x as long, it should definitely be the preferred option. Now the goal is to expand international railway connections, extend the railway compensation rights to make the trip safer to book, and provide a pan-European ticketing system that shows the lowest prices and allows all connections on a single ticket.
I regularly hear people say stuff like “I would like to take the train, but the flight was cheapest”. “You know, i’d take the train, but with switching twice and 8 hours… and the flight was only a bit more expensive”
There is still a lot of convenience over actual need.
This varies from country to country, but over here a train trip is, in general, more expensive than a flight to the same destination by a significant factor
without looking it up I guess there are more commercial flights than flights with private jets. would you also tax flights of private planes that are not jets?
Without looking it up, how many people does 1 commercial flight carry, and how many people does one private flight carry? How much fuel, therefore, is burned per person on each private flight? A private flight that could’ve been done on a commercial flight?
We’ll sit here until you work it out. Don’t worry, we have cheese and a flask of tea
You’re both right. The stuff that the rich do is a lot worse per person, but most emissions don’t come from people who are rich by first world standards.
E.g. in Germany poorest 99% of the country are still responsible for about 91% of the emissions, the poorest 90% for 71% and the the poorest 50% for 27% Link in German.
So yeah, the carbon emissions are a great argument to increase taxes on the rich, but that doesn’t change that everyone will have to make some changes with their way of life if we want to avoid a climate catastrophe.
Sounds good! Now just make sure to include a clause that planes below a certain (carbon emission) threshold are excluded, so it actually promotes innovation and change, and doesn’t just make it more expensive.
I know technically there are a few little islands on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean that you could count as European but I am assuming the main focus of European flights would be flights within Europe.
Exactly! While Greenland and Iceland are geographically considered American (or half Amarican, half European for Iceland) , they are geopolitically considered European countries.
This means that a European rail, connecting all European countries, would need a rail to Greenland, which is on the other side of the Atlant.
Now, I’m not arguing against trains, they are a useful tool for the right job, but planes fill a different role (small load but high speed transport to hard-to-reach locations) that trains cannot fulfill in the same capacity. So instead of abolishing planes, we should try to force them to be more environmentally viable.
I really can’t wait for the internet to learn the reality of trains and get over this obsession, the steel required for tracks is a huge issue before we even get to the logistics and wasted energy involved in running them - a carbon neutral fuel source would make plains considerably better from an ecological perspective then trains for long and medium length journeys - we’re already in the process of taking solutions to market and the chemistry isn’t especially difficult so it’s something that’s absolutely going to happen.
I love trains but they’re not an ecological panacea.
I really can’t wait for this trend of “There is this technology just around the corner that will allow us to not change anything major about the status quo” predictions to die. We are very late to this attempt to prevent climate change from fucking us over completely. We need technologies that are mature and on the market now with some infrastructure already built, nothing that is still in pre-production stages will be the dominant form of travel/energy production or anything else in our society that requires major infrastructure within the 10-15 years we have to change our society for the better.
I get what you’re saying but look how absurdly difficult it is to make high speed rail, the UK are no strangers to making trains but HS2 has been a huge disaster with endless extra costs, ecoprotesters delaying it and etc - it’s currently expected that stage one will open between 2029 and 2033, they started planning in 2009. Rail is not a quick and easy solution, it’s also cost £100 Billion and the options to upgrade it are incredibly limited.
Meanwhile in Washington state they’re building a facility which uses carbon from the air to make jet fuel, the us military already tested it in all their jets and it works great - it’s not especially difficult chemistry so likely to be commercialised at a competitive price point. It doesn’t require engine modifications or anything like that, can be made with excess power from renewables at peek times to lower the cost even more and make wind and solar much better investments.
We’ve been using blended biofuel in aviation for over a decade without anyone really noticing, we’ve also been switching to electrofuels - Obama created ARPA-E the same year HS2 was unveiled, they had some significant successes such as using co2 as the fuel source (though got shifted to focus on fracking without anyone caring which is a real shame). There are various projects around the world creating efuel already with plenty more in the planning and development stages.
It’s not a perfect solution but it’s an actionable solution and a great stopgap, it could even be the boost carbon sequestration needs to become a profitable technology which leads to new markets being established and us actually starting to pull measurable quantities of carbon from the air.
I love trains and I hate flying, but if we can make carbon neutral fuels then being able to zoom over the top of beautiful ecosystems rather than dissect them with steel rails would be better for everything, building all the infrastructure for a giant rail network would create huge amounts of emissions and take decades to get to the point where the daily savings Vs cars has paid off, it would put us deeper in the hole and probably way past the point where net zero can help.
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