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France to tax flights from its airports, airline shares fall

reuters.com

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

#341

Post by zjaffee »

ericd wrote: post #274
DeepYogurt wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it is us who are actually performing the "consumerism". It is us who buys tons of garbage and then throw it out. If only we could collectively incentivize more efficient lifestyles.

I agree, I think a carbon tax that puts a price on the damage people do day to day with their behavior is the only thing that’s going to work on a meaningful scale. The needed changes are too painful to make without pushing hard on peoples’ wallets.

Carbon taxes end up being a regressive tax on the poor (not entirely, but marginally), especially given that poorer folks are often forced to commute longer distances and live in less well insulated and modernized homes.

An approach that focuses on decreasing the price of clean technology, rather than one that just raises the price of dirtier tech and assumes later rebalancing would be a much more effective approach, with possibly still having carbon taxes for corporations, but not individuals.

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

#342

Post by smallbigfish »

davidw wrote: post #310
smallbigfish wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't really live "efficient" being poor.

Poor people are responsible for way less in terms of carbon.

Not really in my experience. I live in a country that buys old cars from the rich. We have many "ohh, my lungs" cars here.

The same with appliances. People are too poor to buy A+++ electronics.

If you meant poor enough so I go hunting... then yes.

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

#343

Post by bengalister »

keiferski wrote: post #48

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)

Train infrastructure in France is not premium anymore, like our health system. Sure if you compare to North America like Canada, it is still better. I took the Via rail train in Canada last year from Toronto to Montreal, seats were spacious, good catering, but the journey was long and trains outdated. As for the price it was not crazy expensive but not cheap.

The high speed train in France (TGV) is really expensive if you cannot get any discount compared to flights. I live near Nice in France and leaving my car in the airport parking lots is often more expensive than the flights themselves, even for 3 days ! For instance a one-way flight from Lille to Nice with Easyjet (around 900km) can cost only 60 Euros, it can be 100Euros back and forth. Also trains in France are more subject to strikes and delays. Well any mean of transportation in France is subject to strikes but the occurrence is greater with trains.

Again the French government thinks that creating a French tax will pave the road to an European one. I highly doubt so. French airports and airlines will suffer from it compared to their European equivalent, and if an European tax is created, it won't probably make the French tax disappear. France loves taxes, we see the results.

Again

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

#344

Post by [deleted] »

ivl wrote: post #326
WhompingWindows wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a constant war of words here: are individuals responsible for cleaning up their footprint, or are corporations responsible for their dirty practices, or are governments responsible for putting policies to guide the economy? The answer is: we need all three. We will not tackle climate change without strong change on the personal, corporate, and governmental levels.

Consumers drive the business decisions. Set incentives to make the consumers choose the more environmentally conscious choice, via a carbon / plastic / waste tax to cover the externalities.

[deleted]

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

#345

Post by zjaffee »

pjc50 wrote: post #311
gambiting wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's two things to this. Yes, we shouldn't be buying shampoo in the disposable plastic containers - but corporations shouldn't be able to manufacture them in the first place.

So .. what should we be buying shampoo in? Not glass in the shower? Non-recyclable tetra pack?

Ideally bringing the old bottle somewhere to get it refilled.

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

#346

Post by icebraining »

skosch wrote: post #186
hedora wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

The stock price of Air France barely took a hit, and already rebounded.

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

#347

Post by WA »

ivl wrote: post #326
WhompingWindows wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a constant war of words here: are individuals responsible for cleaning up their footprint, or are corporations responsible for their dirty practices, or are governments responsible for putting policies to guide the economy? The answer is: we need all three. We will not tackle climate change without strong change on the personal, corporate, and governmental levels.

Consumers drive the business decisions. Set incentives to make the consumers choose the more environmentally conscious choice, via a carbon / plastic / waste tax to cover the externalities.

If consumer drove business decisions, we‘d still have no seat belts and the ozone layer would not exist anymore because of CFC.

In some ways, consumers can make a difference, but only to serve as a trigger for political decisions (if we get lucky).

Also in your example, what comes first – the consumer’s choice or the carbon tax?

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

#348

Post by davidw »

smallbigfish wrote: post #342
davidw wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor people are responsible for way less in terms of carbon.

Not really in my experience. I live in a country that buys old cars from the rich. We have many "ohh, my lungs" cars here. The same with appliances. People are too poor to buy A+++ electronics. If you meant poor enough so I go hunting... then yes.

Here's some data:

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-by-income-region

I'm sure there is some nuance there, but by and large, wealthier people produce more CO2.

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

#349

Post by isostatic »

hayd wrote: post #324
marnett wrote: post #211

> Want to do something about climate change? Start with yourself I really dislike this line of thinking. I don’t manufacture millions of tons of concrete or millions of single-use plastic shampoo bottles. Our current path is irreversible if drastic shifts in disposable consumerism don’t occur soon.

"Start with yourself" And this doesn't address that, it just attempts to price the poor out of flying... Awesome stuff. This will have zero impact on the affluent, we'll continue to fly whenever and wherever we want.

And the amount of money raised can then be spent on cleaning up the externalities.

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

#350

Post by perfunctory »

avip wrote: post #333
perfunctory wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if drastic shifts in disposable consumerism don’t occur soon. Now the question is how to achieve the drastic shift. The popular opinion is that we need to vote in the right politicians and the change should come from the top. I used to think this way for a long time. I've changed my opinion recently. Think about any significant societal change in the last century or so. Women suffrage, civil rights movement, anti-w…

Another point I find relevant is all your examples involved a non-trivial (possibly overwhelming for this crowd) use of violence (which I think you somewhat understated as civil disobedience ). So... do we have the stamina to ramp up our "protest" into something mildly violent?

civil disobedience is by definition non-violent. Unless by non-trivial violence you mean the violence against the protesters (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Riders)
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