391–400 of 578 posts
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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?
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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.
Why are they taxing flights rather than fuel? There's nothing wrong with "flying"! What's wrong is how they get their airspeed, namely by burning fossil fuel. Also those prices are insulting. There is no jet fuel tax in the EU. This gimmick tax is less than what people driving cars pay in taxes on their fuel for a tank of gas. Governments want to increase tax on car fuels (hence the yellow jacket movement) but still…
(When that happened, the US disliked it so much that they passed the "European Union Emissions Trading Scheme Prohibition Act" to prohibit US carriers from complying. And China threatened to cancel airbus orders. As a result, flights that go outside of the European Economic Area are not covered by the scheme.)
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The purpose of the tax is to recover the external cost of flying. Ideally there are alternatives to flying, but it's not a requirement: as long as flying has an environmental price, recovering it through tax is a decent logic. We can discuss the offered price, or how the tax could be structured, but I don't think the approach is unreasonable on its face.
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.
This is a good point, actually ...
If the tax is punitive enough that it results in a meaningful decrease in miles flown then it has a positive environmental impact, but it's difficult to imagine the taxes being that punitive. That's probably politically impossible.
In order for this to "recover" something, as is being discussed, you'd need a way to convert these dollars into carbon sinks of some kind - which isn't, itself, without controversy ...
I am personally in favor of removing subsidies to air travel and increasing taxes on miles flown such that the impact would be noticeable, but again, that's a tall order, politically.
Because in France ecofascism is becoming the #1 religion thanks to leftist propaganda. Government uses that to increase taxes.
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)
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/578284/train-ai...
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)
For comparison, Paris-Marseilles is about a 1hr20 flight. Maybe comparable given airport hassle these days, but that is on what is perhaps the best route in Europe for showing what trains can do. I doubt cost comes in to most train-flight comparisons and I'm not sure what the point of the tax would be if not to change behaviour.
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…
Maybe not.
Firstly, it depends what is done with the proceeds. A fee and dividend system that redistributes the proceeds among all citizens can be made as progressive as you want, depending on the policy for sizing everyone's dividend.
Second,even if the dividend is an equal dollar amount for every citizen, the average person is made more than whole bythe dividend, while most wealthy individuals who have larger homes,engage in more air travel, buy new cars more frequently, etc will fund a disproportionately large fraction of the proceeds.
The UK already taxes flights in a similar way. Whilst this does feel like progress, it would be much better to tax the fuel instead of the passengers. Virtually all other fuel is taxed, so it's strange that jet fuel is exempt. The problem with taxing passengers instead of fuel include: - it doesn't encourage improving the efficiency of planes - airlines can't fill their planes with really cheap seats, and empty seats…
I thought the fuel tank had to be relatively empty in order to land.