This has good intentions but all this will do is make it so low income people can’t travel, and not really affect the rich who are mostly the problem here.
This assumes that flights are the option of choice for low income people to travel, but in fact low income people rarely fly with over 50% never flying and 31% flying less than once a year as opposed to high income households where only 50% never fly or fly less than once a year (https://www.mobilitaet-in-deutschland.de/archive/pdf/MiD2017_Tabellenband_Deutschland.pdf, p. 74, I’ve seen similar things for other countries, will probably be much less for the top 1%). Poor people are more likely to choose closer destinations and choosing their own car, long-distance busses (common in eastern europe) and travel less in general, not only due to the time cost and cost of transport, but also the high cost of accommodations.
Flying is one of the few areas where the distribution of flights taken is so strongly slanted by income that even a flat per flight tax would cost (by income) the 50% income percentile roughly as much as the top percentile worldwide (https://theicct.org/aviation-fft-global-feb23/ fig. 1).
If even the cost of flying can’t be touched because of concerns about disadvantaging poor people, nothing can, because flying is truly one of the things the things that is most strongly tied to income (of relevant emissions ,https://www.carbonbrief.org/richest-people-in-uk-use-more-energy-flying-than-poorest-do-overall/).
The poorest are already not travelling, sure, but making travelling even more expensive is going to stop a whole lot more people from doing it.
And it’s not that flying prices “can’t be touched”, it’s that touching them should come along with creating alternatives, but that mostly doesn’t happen in my experience. In Portugal, gas taxes have increased over the years and a carbon tax has been added on top of the already existing ones to incentivize other means of transportation. The promise, years ago, was that this would also help the state fund public transport. That mostly hasn’t happened. New transport infrastructure is mostly only built around the couple of cities where transports were already fairly good and the rest of the country just gets continually shafted. Just last week some study popped up on the news that there’s more people in Portugal simply not going anywhere on their vacation.
With the rise of accommodation costs in Portugal, driven by everyone from richer countries in Europe seeing us as their big beach, and with how expensive transports are, it’s often cheaper to fly to other European cities and then use their transport infrastructure than picking a local destination. When I want to travel, I book in advance, take the cheapest flight and backpack only so I don’t pay any added taxes. I do it out of season and to places where accommodation is cheap. This is very common for people my age, at least in my social group. If flight prices in Europe get much more expensive, I’m sure it won’t affect many but the absolute poorest in France or Germany, where the minimum salary is what a top 15% earner in Portugal makes, but a lot of portuguese people will certainly travel much less.
Again, though I understand the emergency of fighting the climate crisis, a bunch of climate measures coming out of Europe often feel like the rich countries shafting us - and shafting the poorer overall - without coming up with any alternative. It feels like European legislators - and even europeans in general - think that the whole of Europe is France or the Netherlands or other countries where if you ban flights entirely or come up with yet another mandatory tax that make gas absurdly expensive people can just get on one of the cheap trains going by every 10 minutes - but that’s not a fair representation of all - or even most - of Europe.
I can’t judge the state of Portugese public transport (apart from the fact that the lissabon-madrid rail link is a tragedy, mostly thanks to portugal), but flying is very obviously a big-city thing. Inhabitants of big cities fly much more because the airport with frequent and direct flights is right around the corner as opposed to rural places where the nearest airport is quite some distance away and serves few destinations.
In general poor people fly very little, which is also the case in Germany, so I can’t imagine it making much of a dent around there for the poorest. Portugal is itself mostly responsible for its transportation network and, if I’m understanding https://www.railjournal.com/in_depth/road-out-rail-in-under-new-portugese-plan/ correctly, the portugese government has chosen to invest in its road network over rail in the recent past. While just looking at the cp website it seems that prices are pretty low compared to germany or france. Similarly for hostels it seems porto and lissabon are cheaper than many less touristy cites like lyon, toulouse, cologne, genoa, … right now. I just can’t imagine it being cheaper to fly outside of portugal for vacations based on those prices. And at least for gas taxes there certainly is an alternative without large changes that is especially viable for non city-dwellers: electric cars. While still too expensive, they are much cheaper than even 5 years ago.
The last point is entirely ridiculous: The Netherlands certainly isn’t known for cheap trains and france is the opposite of a train every 10 minutes (especially outside paris), with often large multi-hour gaps between TGV connections from many cities. Most people in other european countries fly much less than people in Portugal or Spain: Portugal and Spain have one of the highest per-capita flight rates in europe (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/air-trips-per-capita), more than double germany or france, even though spain has one of the largest HSR networks (in total and per-capita) in europe.
Flying is one of the few climate related things where the only foreseeable “solution” is a reduction. For heating, electricity, driving, steel, … there are technological solutions in the works and often already deployed that should solve the problem in the next 20-30 years. For flying there is little in the works. The aviation industry talks about SAF while missing targets for implementing them or even thoughts on how to deploy them on a large scale, while mostly ignoring the various non-CO2 related effects flying has on the climate. Flying related emissions mostly increase year-over-year (due to increasing demand) without indications of reduced emissions in the near future. And with flying mostly being for leisure, it is doesn’t need to be directly replaced.
And just to repeat myself: Flying just mostly isn’t a thing poor people do.
all this will do is make it so low income people can’t travel, and not really affect the rich
It can change the relative attractiveness of competing travel modes.
If currently plane costs 30 and train costs 50, the economic incentive is to take the plane. If then plane costs 70 and train still costs 50, the incentive switched to taking the train.
It will also mean people who could affort 30 but cannot afford 50 (or 70) will not travel at all, right. But for those who still travel, train has become financially more attractive compared to plane. Both effects are a win for the climate.
A proper tax & dividend scheme would have solved both issues. Tax carbon (no exemptions), refund per capita.
the rich who are mostly the problem here
while it’s true that the rich are pollution way more than most people - on a population-size it’s still just a drop. If you can make everyone reduce their pollution by 10% that’s more reduction in total that cutting the pollution of the top 0,1% in half.
Sure that second part is needed as well (if only to make those “I don’t have to change anything”-statements like yours invalid) but it’s not nearly as effective as putting measures in place that influence everyone
This is such a vague and unspecific statement that it can’t be wrong. It also agitates.
