This is straightforward protection for Air France and the other big airlines. Cheap flights are used to make sure that seats are filled. Minimum pricing will mean more planes will fly with empty seats and therefore less efficiently. There will be fewer flights, but the ones that remain will be more expensive and more polluting on a per-seat basis. The wealthy will continue to pay and enjoy less crowded planes. Bonus!
Yet another case of the environmental Baptists providing cover for the polluting bootleggers.
> There will be fewer flights, but the ones that remain will be more expensive and more polluting on a per-seat basis.
So less polluting in total, which is at least one of the goals?
> The wealthy will continue to pay and enjoy less crowded planes.
If there are less planes available and flying is less practical, "the wealthy" might start considering taking a train instead. Trains are mentioned in the article so I think that's yet another goal.
I'm not sure what you're suggesting instead. This proposal is not perfect because nothing is.
The wealthy in Europe go by private jets. The upper middle class travels by business class (some of them fly via rented private jet too, if they have an expensive hobby, or if they're flying as part of work), and don't really care for the price either. It's the middle middle class who will be shafted once again.
Just observations of my circle of private flyers. This proposal is bullshit of the Eurocrat variety, since it's meant to put all the blame on the middle class, instead of on the former.
France could have proposed shifting all the EU entities in Strasbourg to Brussels, which will have an immediate positive environmental impact. But obviously the canards in the French govt and the EU won't.
Not private-jet wealthy, but solid upper middle class here. I regularly take a trip across Europe that is a 1h 50m flight. It is about 18h by train, with three transfers, four different operators. If I can't afford flying, I'll drive.
And that's from someone whose daily commute is a train.
Yeah, so airlines would suddenly become unable to fill their planes AND unable to reduce the amount of flights or use smaller planes...?
All these are characteristics of aviation already today. It'll be hard to find a business model as ruthless in terms of customer-commitment than aviation.
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So if the concern is that airlines will be unable to adapt to less business, I'd say: Let's find out.
Oh. And let's remove the tax-exemption of Aviation fuel
Exactly. If everyone took the plane to work, and every one of those flights were fully booked we'd have the best "CO2 per passenger" for airlines ever. And we'd kill the environment.
I'd rather have 10 flights per day with 1 person on each flight, than 20 full ones.
It seems to be really complicated to reach consensus to change the EU Energy Taxation Directive, which currently prohibits taxation of commercial aviation fuel.
It's ridiculous how the market is artificially skewed in favor of aviation, while (most of) the same EU member states struggle to compete with their OWN train service...
I'd say the EU should tax the fuel for flights within EU and pump the money into a connected (and centrally bookable!) railway-network.
The US used to have a fixed prices for flights, set by the Civil Aeronautics Board. There ended up being a lot of gimmickry with how airlines competed with each other - for example, airlines would do stuff like fly more flights than they needed to, so they could point to all the empty seats and ask the CAB to raise prices for their route to offset the money they were losing.
But maybe this time price controls will be different.
Well prices for those customers were relatively inelastic (think, business flights being comped by the employer, airlines having quasi-monopolies on routes) so the airlines knew they could raise prices without impacting demand. Conversely lowering prices likely wouldn't impact demand either. The sensible thing to do under normal market conditions would be to fly fewer flights, but when a central planner is setting your prices it changes the logic.
From the article: "In France, half of all flights are taken by just 2% of people. In the U.K., 15% of travelers take 70% of flights and 8% of the Dutch take 42%."
I wouldn't expect i.e. these 2% (!) of people in France who make up 50% (!) of all trips to change their traveling habits just because the minimum price was raised. They likely pay significantly more on traveling each month already.
Sounds like a commercial aviation fuel tax would be more effective, with those 2% of people then paying 50% of all aviation fuel, instead of lower-income occasional travelers randomly paying more...
That's what I mean! If you have 2% of people doing 50% of trips, those people probably don't care about the cost.
You do, however, also have 98% of people doing the other 50% of trips. There's a good chance some of those 98% do care about the cost and might not fly if the cost is higher, e.g. you might decrease the number of trips taken.
The price is most determined by the competition and acceptable margins. As long as carbon emissions permits are applied universally at the market level making sure no one carrier can subvert those fees, it is likely that the rise in ticket prices would be much lower than the rise in taxes to the airlines.
As a side-effect, I’m wishfully dreaming that trains will become cheaper and make more attractive against short-haul flights.
There's some movements to reduce taxes and fees for trains to make them more competitive financially too. Makes sense.
(A similar approach is also taking hold for home heating and EV charging, no point taxing something you are trying to encourage and that will then cost you more money elsewhere)
A better way to achieve the desired effect of fewer flying miles (if that is the intention) would be to increase fuel taxes etc.
Minimum prices just cut off the low end of the market, and seems obviously designed to protect the big/more-expensive players and their wealthier customers.
One of France's neighbours taxes petrol sales at 65c/l, not the percentage you might be thinking of as tax. It was done that way because a flat tax fit the political purpose of the tax.
So what's the political purpose? I'd guess that the goal is to reduce the difference between the apparent very low price of flights and the average price actually charged by the airlines, so that flying won't seem so cheap. Ie. the goal of the initiative is to correct a false impression of the price of flying, which is not a matter of economics at all and not something economics can sort out.
Hm, I don't understand this. What causes the apparent low price? Do you mean that they make it so the cheap flights are extremely cheap, and subsidized by the more expensive flights, as a marketing ploy?
The apparent low price is caused by advertising and word of mouth. Everyone knows that Ryanair sells €10 tickets from A to B, see? And Ryanair really does, a few seats per plane.
The average actual price is the average of the total price paid, which is not just the first few seats per plane, and which also includes all those taxes and extras.
If people make travel decisions before buying the tickets (as they're almost forced to), then some/many of them will base the decision of how to travel on the word-of-mouth price they've already heard rather than on the price they'll see at the end of the purchase process.
I see, thanks, so the EU is basically trying to stop the marketing tactic. That makes sense, though it's not about stopping "cheap flights" then (I haven't seen a 10 € ticket with Ryan in years).
This thread is full of a frustrating amount of poorly thought out convictions (someone actually said they would rather see 10 flights with 1 passenger than 20 flights full per day. Really? Are you totally mental???)
None of the environmental people on here are taking into account any benefit from these flights and none of the economics minded people have done a good job explaining why this is a bad idea, so here it goes:
The correct answer, as always is to price pollution properly with a carbon tax or cap and trade because then the most efficient providers can kill off the less efficient and provide more per the same unit of pollution. They don't want to do this because that inefficient provider is air france and the air france equivalents and those are sacred cows. A tax or cap and trade would also apply to other inefficient pseudo government sacred cows like state owned energy companies, etc. By putting in a minimum price on a narrow set of polluters they can then target stuff they don't like rather than preferentially hurt the worst offenders (which are often the government!) And they can make us all much poorer by artificially limiting consumer choice (which should never be the goal of pollution regulation. The goal of pollution regulation should be to limit pollution to an acceptable amount while maximizing benefit to consumers and the best, cheapest, easiest way for that to happen is by pricing the pollutant and letting consumers tell us what they want through their purchases at the new price. Its pretty much never achieved by government mandate because government cannot know your personal preferences across all of society.
There is a benefit to keeping the rules as simple as possible. Capping the number of flights is simpler to understand. Most of the problems with flying are fairly well correlated with number of flights.
Trying to directly cap emissions seems like a good way to make the program fail before it even starts. Do you penalize fliers who end up on an older, less efficient jet? Takeoffs burn a lot of fuel so do you penalize fliers who take flights with a layover? If a plane flies half-full, do the passengers pay more?
That's not how it would work. If an airline company plans to emit X amount of CO2, they need to buy the right to do so. The cost would only be indirectly paid by consumers through the cost of their ticket. You can think of it like a currency that polluters need to spend (or more accurately, eliminate, since there is no recipient) when they pollute.
Capping and trading is the more simple solution. Instead of putting various restrictions and limits on a ad hoc basis (often influenced by lobbyists and special interest groups) for dozens and dozens of activities, you have just one unified system.
I like the idea that I, as a consumer, have a quota that I can sell. Burying it in the price of the ticket hides it too much IMHO.
I also think it would be an easier thing to sell politically. Most people don't fly every year and giving them an easy way to turn their lack of travel into a small bonus is appealing.
A cap-and-trade program has the double whammy of being a tax / regulation and pro-environment. Two things the right and much of the center are going to say "no" to.
If only trains were reliable and affordable - in reality they're shit. Almost always late, crowded, bookings oftentimes not working, more expensive than flights, pets and bicycles cost extra, ...
Other than Switzerland, which European countries have a significantly better rail network than Germany? Certainly not Italy, Spain, UK, Norway or Sweden. The Netherlands was pretty good to be fair, but building a train network in the Netherlands is kind of like playing on Easy mode.
I wonder if you could have some kind of personal allowance, say 10 flights a year and any more than this you start getting taxed heavily for them. That would hit frequent flyers more.
Banning flights where an equivalent 2.5hour train journey exists sounds good, but might the train lines then ramp up the price if there no alternative flight?
As a Finnish person, I think we should strive also to improve connectivity between Finland and Sweden and Finland and Estonia. After that solution for train travel between Finland and Poland could be considered.
Ofcourse. I'm being facetious. France proposed increasing prices, Ireland's only quick direct way reaching other countries within the European Union, perhaps if it's direct to France, France can pay for the link.
People living in countries like Cyprus and Malta don't have the luxury of alternative transportation methods so flight prices are not changing. Expect veto.
especially when they take double the time a normal airplane would.
If trains took double (or even 3 times) what an airplane took they would definitely be an alternative. Given the choice between a 1-2 hour flight and a 3-5 hour train ride, I virtually always choose the train. Especially since the train drops me in the centre of the city I'm going to
The problem is they often take 10+ times what the airplane takes. From where I live to Paris or Zurich is either a 2 hour direct flight from the airport 30 minutes down the road or literally 20+ hours and 5-8 transfers by train.
especially if you take into consideration the time spent on the airport throught security, checkin, baggage, etc, it will be almost double that 1-2 hour which is the flight only
There's a strong argument that your life will be worse when climate change hits (as it already is.) Convenience at this level is very short-term thinking.
Would you give back the ~1 degree we gained over the last 100 years for the standard of living we had 100 years ago? Most people wouldn't take that trade, yet I see a lot of people advocating for economic de-growth or decreasing life standards over the next degree... Personally, I'd rather take the next degree and fly around the world. In 100 years, if those 2-3 degrees becomes an actual problem, everyone will have AC, everything will be electric, and the climate will be back on track for another ice age.
First build a Europe wide bullet train network, then make flights unaffordable.
Europe needs travel infrastructure, and the world needs less pollution. You cannot pick one, solve both.
Yet another case of the environmental Baptists providing cover for the polluting bootleggers.