211–220 of 578 posts
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.
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What's the alternative to flying?
Falling comes to mind :) I guess that's why the tax is on take-off, so everyone can afford landing! Bad jokes aside France has a huge highspeed rail network.
About time. Traveling is killing the planet. One of major causes of climate change. We need to take it seriously. I'm glad France is willing to take a bold and brave step to support the environment.
Yawn There are much worse polluters, sure, travel is a contribution to greenhouse gasses, but I guess fuck people for wanting to take a plane somewhere Though the tax is small, so this seems more like a money grab than anything else
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…
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.
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)
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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.
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.
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Is the carbon footprint for train travel significantly lower than for plane travel?
About 5-10% of a flight, according to this: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.dw.com/en/trains-vs-planes-...
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Well looks like we need nuclear planes
We don't have nuclear trains, do we? We just replaced coal-fired electric generation with nuclear (in some places at least). Same with planes. Use energy produced by nuclear / solar / wind plants to synthesize jet fuel, operate the planes as normal.
The two nuclear powered vehicles in the USA are carriers and submarines. Owned by the US military. All other nuclear generators are static and surrounded by metric fucktons of concrete.
We could virtually eliminate carbon emissions altogether if humans went back to living in caves and dying at the age of 30. Resources were placed on this earth for the advancement of humankind. If someone wants to take it upon themselves to reduce their carbon footprint by not eating meat, living in a tent or staying in one place their entire lives then be my guest, just don't regress the whole of humanity by mandati…
I hate to be that guy, but [Citation Needed].
Otherwise, I agree with you what what essentially amounts to a primitivist approach is counterproductive.