France to tax flights from its airports, airline shares fall

Aviation accounts for just 2% of global carbon emissions: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/1/11/1817711.... The plastics industry will burn through 14% of remaining carbon budget: https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/05/15/plastics-industry-clim...

>Finally. It's really frustrating to see how heavily subsidized airlines, plane fuel and airports are and how big of a tax breaks they get when they come to a city.

I suppose the Airlines will just pass along any new taxes to the traveling consumer. I was always under the impression that airports in France were economic drivers of prosperity considering tourism makes up about 77 billion euro of economic impact to the GDP France.

Hope it works out for them...

The whole passenger air travel industry (airlines, aircraft manufacturers, airports, etc) is subsidized because they’re not profitable on their own. But a robust and affordable air travel network is a capability the business world needs to operate our economy.

Boeing and Airbus are two of the most heavily subsidized companies in the world, and the airlines themselves aren’t far behind. They’re both high-risk, low-margin businesses.

International Air Travel is one of the most heavily taxed, if not the most heavily taxed, activity. It's not unusual for the taxes to exceed the ticket price. Here I just looked on kayak for a flight from SFO to Berlin. Here is the price breakdown:

   Ticket price USD 465.00
   Taxes, Fees and charges USD 540.52
   ---------
   International/Domestic Surcharge USD 350.00

   APHIS User Fee USD 3.96

   Immigration User Fee USD 7.00

   Customs User Fee USD 5.77

   United States International Departure Tax USD 18.60

   United States International Arrival Tax USD 18.60

   Passenger Civil Aviation Security Service Fee USD 5.60

   Air Transport Tax USD 46.58

   German Aviation Security Charge  19.15

   Passenger Service Charge - Intl USD 23.95

   Passenger Service Charge - Dom. USD 36.81

   Passenger Facility Charge USD 4.50

   Total price USD 1,005.52

You get less of what you tax, and more of what you subsidize.

I guess the French want fewer people visiting their country?

I don’t pay expensive excise taxes, passenger service fees or “security” fees when I’ve taken a train. Yet air travel is taxed to hell and back. I get it, anti-air is the cause du jour, but until there is a train from SFO to Paris that wouldn’t take 20 days, it makes no sense to tax air travel so heavily. Air travel has had the biggest impact on connecting the world than almost any other tech aside from the internet. I would be tar and feathered among a certain crowd for saying this, but I love air travel and if it causes the temperature to rise .25 degrees over the next 50 years, so be it. Airplanes represent freedom. Taxing mobility is taxing freedom itself. Take a train from Marseille to Berlin and then one might appreciate how important air travel is. It’s trendy to oppose air travel but it’s like being opposed to ocean pollution and subsequently banning toddlers from peeing in the water at the beach.

If the entire world went to nuclear power tomorrow, the climate impact of air travel wouldn’t even be a rounding error. Power generation is the biggest contributor to pollution. Airplanes are barely a few percentage points and airplanes in France have such an infinitesimal influence on world climate that the whole exercise is a joke and smacks of self-congratulatory virtue signaling more than any actual solution. Remember the politics here: the cheminots in France have extraordinary power: they can shut down the country on a whim — anything that harms air travel directly benefits one of the most powerful unions in France.

> Virtually all other fuel is taxed, so it's strange that jet fuel is exempt.

"Without any international agreement on taxing fuel, it is highly likely that moves to impose duty on international flights, either at a domestic or European level, would encourage ‘tankering’: carriers filling their aircraft as full as possible whenever they landed outside the EU to avoid paying tax. Clearly this would be entirely counterproductive. Aircraft would be travelling further than necessary to fill up in low-tax jurisdictions; in addition they would be burning up more fuel when carrying the extra weight of a full fuel tank."

This document explains it pretty well: http://www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/SN00523.pdf

It's illegal to tax fuel for international flights. Domestic fuel is already taxed but the Chicago Convention in 1944 set the ground rules for the ICAO and international air travel.

Good points. Just another tax that will be passed straight down to the consumer. Wonder why no wage growth for 10+ years? Will do nothing for the enviroment. "Better not go on that holiday because of the enviroment "

Don’t tax actual fuel, calculate the notice fuel use based on the type of aircraft and the distance flown (so 787 is cheaper than a 747, and a flight to Cairo is less than a flight to Bangkok)

Ideally you apply this across the whole EU at the same level

I thought the fuel tank had to be relatively empty in order to land.

> - airlines can't fill their planes with really cheap seats, and empty seats seem like a ridiculous waste

This has never been true. There is no money in Economy. Almost never has been.

Airlines make money off premium cabins and business travellers who book flights a couple of days in advance.

Example LHR to LAX return. https://i.imgur.com/SCjndu8.png

Fare: £50

One flexible First class return on the exact same flight comes with Fare of £15,628 and taxes of £670. This makes one Flexible First Class ticket worth to them more than the entire capacity of Economy cabin.

Personally, I wouldn't pay that with my own cash, but if I have to fly 6+ hours for leisure, I'm paying for non-flex Business/First class seats.

They couldn't care less how empty/full is the economy cabin. At £25 per leg revenue (not profit), I'd actually be surprised if they break even.

On long haul flights, airlines probably[citation needed] operate Economy cabin at a loss.

>that planes will fly in with enough fuel to fly out again

Planes with fuel are too heavy to land, planes have just enough fuel to get to destination. Landing with 40% fuel capacity would break wheels and damage planes, increase stopping distance.

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.

As an american who's taken the day long (not high speed) trip from Boston to DC, I was amazed how fast and easy to deal with the French Rail was. I only took Paris->LeHarve and Reims >Paris routes. But wow! The subway in Paris worked pretty well too.

Is the carbon footprint for train travel significantly lower than for plane travel?

Because of said train infrastructure I'm flying into paris, touring Europe (on trains) then flying out from berlin. Unless they can get the whole EU to agree to it it's probably going to have that affect.

> For Americans, this would be roughly equivalent to go from Boston to Washington D.C. (a trip that takes 7-10+ hours)

Half of which is stops...

I would love Amtrak to start a service that is just BOS<->NYC<->WAS.

I took the train from Toulouse to Paris last summer and it was very pleasant—especially in comparison to air travel. A few hours of picturesque landscapes with plenty of legroom, baggage space, and opportunities to walk around. I think it’s too bad that we can’t seem to get that working here in the US. (See, eg, California high speed rail project...)

At least in Germany, taking the train is insanely expensive.

> I am actually surprised that short-distance flights aren't taxed more in Western Europe

It does seem the like tax is backwards. They barely tax the flights that could be replaced by rail, but have higher taxes on the ones that can't.

I think they also do direct trains from London to Marseille in about 6 hours these days.

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

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.

International flights are much cheaper in the UK than local trains. I paid the same price for a flight from Cardiff to Malta as for train from Cardiff to Bristol (40 miles).

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/578284/train-ai...

In France train is fine if you want to go to or from Paris, but connections between other cities have been closed or gimped with slower trains and less frequency.

It's really hypocrite of the government to shame people of flying while they've been destroying the train infrastructure all these years.

Marseille to Berlin though, not such a fun trip. Marseille to Frankfurt, multiple hours on trains, 1 hour on an airplane. Stuttgart to Barcelona? Better set aside an entire day. Biarritz to Geneva? The train system is good on certain destinations, but it’s impossible to connect everything like airplanes do.

Airlines are already included in the EU cap and trade scheme. That's effectively a fuel surcharge for CO2.

(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.)

> There's nothing wrong with "flying"! What's wrong is how they get their airspeed, namely by burning fossil fuel.

Sadly at the current time there is no distinction between the two.

> Why are they taxing flights rather than fuel?

Cuz Chicago convention

>What do they expect them to do?

Use trains.

I think they expect people to fly less; similar to many other “sin” taxes like those on alcohol or tobacco.

Do you agree carbon emissions (among others) contribute significantly to warming?

If not, conversation is indeed over and baseless.

If yes, what alternative do we have help reduce carbon emissions in the atmosphere? (because this is something to do, and fast now)

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.

Business class taxes are 3x-6x economy, so corporations/rich people are paying more.

Flying as is is a luxury, economy class or not, and we shouldn't forget that.

Why is it regressive?

You don't need to fly in western Europe, and anyway the charge increases for more expensive classes.

I'm not even sure that carbon taxes overall are regressive. Can't afford a car? Your transport is lower carbon. Drive a small car because you cant afford a large one? Your transport is lower carbon. Cant afford air con, cant afford heating, a new phone every year...

Yes there are edge cases, not being able to afford insulation, an energy efficient fridge or car or whatever but I would guess your average poor person has a lower carbon footprint than your average rich person.

> 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.

> they’re regressive

Nothing a cheque can’t solve.

And by taxing carbon, you get the added benefit of reducing some other tax, like the regressive nature of income taxes (ie: taxing people that have to work because they didn’t inherit/afford capital assets)

I took a plane from Lisbon to Paris for 35 euros last week. That feels incredibly cheap to me, especially compared to high-speed train. I routinely pay twice as much to get not even half as far by TGV. Making train more competitive by taxing planes more might not be a terrible idea. I say might because I can't pretend to even begin to understand all the implications of this tax but hopefully whoever came up with it did...

Carbon taxes are the most efficient way to let the market work out technical solutions to the climate crisis. Period.

If you're worried about regressive taxation, check out the fee-and-dividend model, where all revenue is returned to households [0]. This means that for most "regular" people, the carbon tax is actually a tax credit – because most of the pollution is caused by the excessive consumption by rich households.

There is actually a bill before the House now that has a non-zero chance of passing.

[0] https://citizensclimatelobby.org/carbon-fee-and-dividend/

A general carbon tax should absolutely be paired with a dividend of some kind to offset its effect on the poor.

However consumption patterns by everyone needs to change en masse, and a carbon tax across the board is a no-brainer to adjust individual incentives to achieve this.

> They're regressive, and ignore the fact that regular people are being badly hurt by them whereas the rich won't even feel it.

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.

Carbon taxes are not inherently regressive, that's simply false. What do you DO with the taxes, that's what makes them progressive or regressive. If you rebate the taxes to the people, they become PROgressive, as the rich are much more likely to have higher carbon footprints.

It's a 3€ tax on a flight, those regular people are not being "badly hurt".

>> There's no alternative to burning fuel by energy density on an airline

This initiative makes trains more competitive. Trains are greener and often quicker especially for intra-european continental routes.

There’s nothing inherent to carbon taxes that need to be regressive. E.g., you can provide a dividend or set of benefits from the funds that disproportionately favors the poor.

But not taxing carbon is also “regressive”, in that climate change will disproportionately hurt the world’s poorest.

> They're regressive.

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 purpose of this tax is to get some revenue while making it look like they care about global warming.

You can have a kickback, like Canada. Basically, you pay the carbon tax as a middle class person and then you get a decent amount of money back from the government to cover the damages, and everyone gets up to the same amount (which is like a thousand bucks or something). So, it becomes no biggy for a middle class family who took one flight during the past three years, but a celebrity who flies around with his private jet multiple times a week will feel the pinch.

Seems pretty clear to me? Flying is bad for the environment, spectacularly so. The alternative is not necessarily: flying without burning fuel. But rather: not flying.

And that isn't that big of a problem. We have many alternatives to flying, e.g. a high-speed rail system that has a 10x smaller impact. Of course you want to steer consumers towards that with incentives like these.

Earnings from these taxes don't just disappear in a black hole. They're redistributed. Perhaps to make train travel cheaper and more economically viable. Perhaps electric cars. Given the socioeconomic groups that most frequently use public transport vs air travel, this tax seems progressive, not regressive, if anything.

And that's only one alternative to flying: other forms of travel. Another is simply not travelling at all. There's a reason people don't choose to live 20 hours away from work, or choose to have a daily hobby in another country, or choose to visit friends across the world on a daily basis, because there's a cost to travel. A cost that is too high. And that's okay. Not all travel has to happen, not all travel is important enough to pay the cost.

May seem silly, but if we could teleport around the world for $1, with hypothetically insane costs to the environment, you'd have massive amounts of unnecessary travel. And the right response would be as a society that we could do without much of this unnecessary travel entirely, replace it with viable alternatives to proximity like a phonecall, a skype call, a text message, a picture etc. And we can do this by making it more expensive, and using that money to make low-impact alternatives (relatively) cheaper.

If you know that as a society we're destroying our environment and the current cost of doing so is too cheap, or the destruction is not factored in to the price, the most reasonable solution is to increase the cost.

Related: I was surprised to learn recently that short-distance trips by plane actually have lower CO2-emissions than long-distance ones, because the plane does not need to carry so much fuel just for later use.

Should be based on passenger mass

"No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible" ~ Stanisław Jerzy Lec

Sure, you won't be able to make a measurable impact by yourself. However your mindset quickly leads to a tragedy of the commons type response that leaves us all in trouble. We should all take a more proactive approach to this in both our private life and in our professional work.

It's like this on most issues on HN. Some of them benefit from a larger following (Animal cruelty, politics in your community), while others will simply be useless without government involvement to shut down the offenders. The only thing an individual is really accomplishing by avoiding flights in most cases is inconveniencing themselves and assuaging their conscious. Change needs to come from the top here, or nothing meaningful will get done.

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.

But it is us who are actually performing the "consumerism". It is us who buys tons of garbage and then throw it out. It is us who continue to buy gas guzzlers and wanting to live grossly inefficient lifestyles via living in suburbia, combined with us voting against mass transit.

It is also us who vote in people who do not care about climate change.

Ultimately, we are the ones who are willingly giving money to these companies. We simply don't seem to care on a grand scale because there continues to be high demand for inefficient goods. We are voting with our dollars.

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.

> 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-war movement, gay rights. None of these changes have come from the top. None were initiated by the parliament. They all started as a popular rebellion, direct action and civil disobedience.

And if you did you would probably be chasing and optimizing for your quarterly revenue goals and using every dirty trick in the book to get ahead.

Exactly.

I've done no research on the company but I assume Graham is profiting off of its success. Since only collective action will solve climate change's effects on the middle and lower classes this is just cynical profiteering off of global disasters.

"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.

You're right, but the more people are able to make good choices, the more politicians will be able to put pressure on companies who make money on carbon emissions. Politicians can't do anything unless consumers really show they're able to change.

Climate change is a problem of consumption and how economies are completely dependent on carbon emissions. You just cannot realistically forbid this and this without hurting the economy and its existing carbon-dependent infrastructure. Climate change will be fought on campaigning on consumers so that they call on their good will and shift markets.

I guess the only reliable way to make consumers change their choice is fear mongering about climate change. We need more climate change hard-scifi.

If consumers act like lazy sedentary irresponsible kids, the only way will be to instate hard measures: banning personal cars and adding more organized public transport, switching to reusable glass and steel packaging, reducing bullshit jobs to avoid useless transportation, economies of scale to avoid emissions, a big nuclear energy plan, etc. To be honest all those things should already be startups. They're not complicated. It's a matter of law and how salesmen are pushing consumers to make bad choices.

> I hope there will be holographic rooms that one can use to holographically teleport to another location and do meetings as if they are there in person.

HP took strides on this in 2007 with the "Halo Room".

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press_kits/2008/halo/ds_ha...

I am also surprised by how much this seems to be an answer to that movement, yet it comes a year after this apparent deadlock and all this fighting.

By starting with a small tax which won't affect much CDG, the strategy is probably for France to push it on a EU-level after that.

Heathrow already has UK Air Passenger Duty (at a higher rate!): https://www.gov.uk/guidance/rates-and-allowances-for-air-pas...

LHR can’t get any busier without a third runway, which is increasingly unlikely to be built.

Would lighter planes mean less pollution? Shouldn't we look at per-customer emissions? There's clearly benefit to a 2 seater vs 1 seater, what about 30 seats vs 60 seats? I don't actually know the physics here, would be interesting to see that calculated.

Not really the same population... I honestly don't think it will get much pushback

Tbh, I like it - only 25% of the population flies, and it's the top tier (mostly).

My biggest problem is it's so low. 1.5/3 Euro for EU/non-EU travel.

I think Yellow Jackets won't mind so much because they are defending the poor people, against raising fuel price just to save 0.001 degree in 100 years. I don't think they will perceive this as hitting the population they defend.

Why?

The protest that originated "gilets jaunes" was because the increase in gasoline price would affect low wage workers for which their car was one of the main tools for their job.

I cannot imagine many low wage workers that depend on international flights to take home some bread...

The fact that airplane fuel wasn't as heavily taxed as gas was actually one of the arguments of the gilets jaunes. "We're poor and we can't buy gas to go to work, meanwhile rich people fly to the Caribbeans with subsidized fuel."

Keep in mind that, AFAIK, traveling by plane is significantly more mainstream in the USA (probably due to the huge distances and lack of viable alternatives) than it is in Europe and specifically in France.

There are indeed a lot of things that were "normal" just a few years back: driving without seat belts, smoking in clubs, having sex with strangers without condoms, eating things that are now restricted due to environmental or health concerns.

It is hard to think that cheap flights can be a "dangerous convenience", but they may very well be.

Thanks for the comment. I posted this with the original title as it was, they have changed it. I edited it just now, but I'm not going to keep checking to see if they change it again...

"The new French tax will be 1.5 euros for flights within France or the European Union, 3 euros for economy flights out of the EU, 9 euros for intra-EU business class and up to 18 euros for business class tickets out of the EU. Transit flights will not be taxed."

I read that as most flights in or out of France being taxed.

"Transit flights" Is that a connecting flight? Seems to be the only exception.

[Citation Needed]

I can't believe I am living in an era that a "bold and brave step" is raising taxes. What a sad world we live in. I guess France and their leaders can sleep well knowing they have stifled the climate crisis. Pat yourself on the back France you "did something".

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

Flying is 5% of CO2 emissions.

Business travel is killing our planet. All the family vacations in the world can't compete with giant companies constantly shuttling thousands of employees all around the globe to attend meetings and conferences.

Traveling is a part of why the world is more integrated and, likely, less violent than it used to be.

People flying around is not just good for businesses and economies, people visiting other places is cultural exchange. Do you really want people to be more culturally isolated?

Taxes also exist to incentivize desired behavior.

See: Solar, EV tax credits

It's just a colorful name.

A sin tax is nothing more than an opinionated Pigouvian tax.

"Sin Taxes" are not meant to literally tax sins but to tax behaviours with negative consequences that where the price is ultimately bourne by society. For example, the cost of second hand smoke is bourne by others, and when they get sick, many times by taxpayers. The cost of alcohol is partly bourne by a variety of parties.

"Sin Taxes" are not meant to discourage literal sins but to discourage such activities with external costs. Many argue sugar should also be added to the list of "sins" though of course it is not Biblically a sin.

Its not a religious thing just a turn of phrase, Sin taxes are typically high taxes on unhealthy things to discourage their use. I don't know its origin but its common in the UK.

Your name makes this incredibly amusing. Thankfully the US is more than just California and rail is functioning on the opposite side of the country. It's a shame that things can't be done but this is the system "working".

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

Username checks out. A return to the etymology of the word might be a refreshing point of view: sin -- as in missing the mark, being in societal, cultural or moral error, or being less than you could be in terms of virtue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20392929 and marked it off-topic.

Yes CDG is doing pretty good job of deterring fliers already .

I had a pretty good experience on my case, nothing to say really. The passport control queues were pretty optimized and things worked as they should. I've definitely seen much worse airport than that.

I think yelp is another site.

It seems most people share your sentiment

http://plus.lefigaro.fr/note/the-most-hated-airport-in-the-w...

Specifically in France the train has a near-zero carbon footprint, because it's electric, and the electricity comes from nuclear power.

Please don't break the site guidelines by being snarky. It leads to low-quality subthreads, which is why we have that guideline.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this one from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20392902.

Can you please not post unsubstantive comments so we don't have to ban you? If instead you'd read the guidelines and take the spirit of this site to heart, we'd be grateful.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Ecology is a new religion, except instead of Apocalypse they have Global Warming, and instead of sin they have "carbon footprint".

The funds have been earmarked for more eco-friendly transport services. It would be easy to go through the budget and see what happened. News articles can only give you so much context. It would consume an entire newspaper to give the back-story of every single news article. The reader is expected to do some work on their own. Also its not some 'random' tax. France has what they call an "ecological defense council" consisting of 150 randomly chosen citizens who debate such matters with domain experts. This idea has come out of such meetings.

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

Please, allow me to ask you, how this bold statement contributes to this conversation?

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.

Nice bingo: * ecofascism, leftist, propaganda. * account created a few minutes ago.

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Airlines dont pollute. Their customers do.

Trains in France are State-owned and heavily indebted, so more money would just mean reducing some of that debt; even then, the amount of money expected to be taxed (~200 M€) is nothing compared to the national railway budget, which is around 30-40B €.

> I just don't see how this helps.

Just curious, what would be your favorite solution(s) of the climate crisis?

It should be easy to see what happened to the tax revenue in the budget numbers. Large taxes and fees are risky. Governments are usually careful to not put an entire industry (including thousands of jobs) at risk of overnight collapse. Also, airlines already benefit from aviation fuel tax exemptions (to the tune of billions of dollars). Maybe we should be looking at slowly getting rid of those too.