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France to tax flights from its airports, airline shares fall

reuters.com

121–130 of 578 posts

Re: France to tax flights from its airports, airline shares fall

#121
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oxfam says that the 10% richest account for 50% of air pollution. People that have enough money to travel by plane should have enough money to not destroy our environment.

If the source you're citing is Oxfam's report on Extreme Carbon Inequality [1][2], which was widely reported as saying that the world's richest 10% produce half of global carbon emissions, that is incorrect. If you read the PDF, they're only looking at estimates of "lifestyle consumption emissions", not total emissions. From the PDF: > Emissions associated with consumption by governments, capital and international tr…

Thanks for linking the PDF, which says this:

> Around 50% of these emissions meanwhile can be attributed to the 10% richest of people around the world, who have average carbon footprints 11 times as high as the poorest half of the population, and 60 times as high as the poorest 10%. The average footprint of the richest 1% of people globally could be 175 times that of the poorest 10%.

Re: France to tax flights from its airports, airline shares fall

#122
post #87

Why are Americans so obsessed with religion, devil and sins?! Taxes exist to capture money and finance the externalities that are ignored by corporations. If corporations were more responsible countries would not have to tax these issues. In this case France is using the money to improve an already pretty good rail system. Compare this to the US and the California train line?

It's quite an established term and not just used by Americans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin_tax

The Wikipedia article is translated to only four other languages. How is this an established term in the world?

Re: France to tax flights from its airports, airline shares fall

#123
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a working definition of fascism here or are you using it as something closer to "a bad politics thing"?

From Wikipedia: «Fascism ... characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society and of the economy». There are people who see the enforcement of the green agenda in these terms, like this: you can't speak publicly against it, you can't act openly against it, and it gets forced on the economy through the power of the state. I personally think that such a view is…

>>"[..]you can't speak publicly against it, you can't act openly against it,[..]"

By this, I suppose you mean that, if you do it, you will get some angry answers in your direction, but, is that not true about anything deserving to talk about?

It works in the other direction too: I have heard pretty harsh insults against ecologist (yeah, sometimes they are even called fascists).

>>"[..] and it gets forced on the economy through the power of she state."

Yes, but all economic organization is forced through the power of the state, starting by property rights. So, nothing new there.

Re: France to tax flights from its airports, airline shares fall

#124
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that you can get from France to Algeria by land and there are extensive rail networks across all the connecting regions, including extensive rail networks in Algeria itself, built originally by the French, I would be amused to know how you came up with this conclusion.

France and Algeria are not connected by land.

They are, it's just a long journey.

Re: France to tax flights from its airports, airline shares fall

#125

I am actually surprised that short-distance flights aren't taxed more in Western Europe. The train infrastructure in France is world class and can get you from Paris (North-Central part of the country) to Marseille (Southeast), a distance of about 500 miles, in 3 hours. For Americans, this would be roughly equivalent to go from Boston to Washington D.C. (a trip that takes 7-10+ hours)

[deleted]

Re: France to tax flights from its airports, airline shares fall

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

> 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?

There are ferries from Tunis to various spots in Italy, at which point you can likely hop on a train.

Re: France to tax flights from its airports, airline shares fall

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The train infrastructure is not perfect, the biggest issue being travels not going to/from Paris: the lines aren't as good and there aren't a lot of high-speed lines.

And they’re expensive compared to flying the equivalent route/distance.

But save you from the pain of getting to/from CDG.

Re: France to tax flights from its airports, airline shares fall

#128
post #24

I think there is this thing called the train.

Immigrants cant train to algeria

I don't think that invalidates the idea.

I can't fly everywhere, I still have to do the last mile some other way. In the sane way I don't expect the train to pick me up out side my house.

Further I don't expect to go to my local airport and expect to be able to travel to any other airport direct, so why should the same apply to train travel?

Re: France to tax flights from its airports, airline shares fall

#129
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite an established term and not just used by Americans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin_tax

The Wikipedia article is translated to only four other languages. How is this an established term in the world?

There is no Chinese article on Wikipedia but it can be translated to 罪孽稅 which is an established concept. So that covers another 1.4bn people.

Re: France to tax flights from its airports, airline shares fall

#130
post #76

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 th…

> 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.

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.
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