Sounds good! Now just make sure to include a clause that planes below a certain (carbon emission) threshold are excluded, so it actually promotes innovation and change, and doesn’t just make it more expensive.
You mean like planes that have no wings and fly roughly 0mm above metal rails on the ground?
I really can’t wait for the internet to learn the reality of trains and get over this obsession, the steel required for tracks is a huge issue before we even get to the logistics and wasted energy involved in running them - a carbon neutral fuel source would make plains considerably better from an ecological perspective then trains for long and medium length journeys - we’re already in the process of taking solutions to market and the chemistry isn’t especially difficult so it’s something that’s absolutely going to happen.
I love trains but they’re not an ecological panacea.
I really can’t wait for this trend of “There is this technology just around the corner that will allow us to not change anything major about the status quo” predictions to die. We are very late to this attempt to prevent climate change from fucking us over completely. We need technologies that are mature and on the market now with some infrastructure already built, nothing that is still in pre-production stages will be the dominant form of travel/energy production or anything else in our society that requires major infrastructure within the 10-15 years we have to change our society for the better.
While a pan Atlantic railroad would be interesting, I think it would run into unique problems better solved with other technologies.
No, I meant planes or other flying vehicles that do not use fuel which is refined from oil.
I know technically there are a few little islands on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean that you could count as European but I am assuming the main focus of European flights would be flights within Europe.
No, just massive tax privat jets fuel.
Why not both?
Because most normal people use a flight when they actually need to.
I regularly hear people say stuff like “I would like to take the train, but the flight was cheapest”. “You know, i’d take the train, but with switching twice and 8 hours… and the flight was only a bit more expensive”
There is still a lot of convenience over actual need.
Then make the fucking trains work not other stuff more expensive…
One way to make the money for making trains better is to end subsidizing and properly taxing planes.
In what scenario would a normal person need to fly within Europe?
Unfortunately the train routes from the Netherlands to, say, Portugal, Spain, Italy, or eastern Europe are not well developed enough yet. The train is great in the directions of Paris, Frankfurt, Berlin, and London, but beyond that it often takes longer than flying and often requires multiple tickets
You just describe when it’s convenient not when anyone needs to fly. With the same reasoning everyone needs to use a car for everything outside a 500m radius because it’s faster than going by bike.
Screw that. I can’t even afford a flight.
A 1000% tax on private jet flights would be nice too tho 🤨
without looking it up I guess there are more commercial flights than flights with private jets. would you also tax flights of private planes that are not jets?
Emissions per passenger per kilometre.
This is exactly what I thought, too.
Oh nice
Instead of trying to lower prices for alternatives (e.g. trains), they just try to jack up prices for existing forms of transport, so that the other transports now seem cheaper. How about taxing the shit out of airlines and using that to get trains down to the price of what airlines charge now?
This is just again getting the mid- and low-income layers to pay for shit.
Who do you think they will pass on those costs? Basically all Airlines make their money on normal tickets and not on the class 1 tickets. What you really want are instead of 0% tax on Airplaine fuel, ridiculous taxes. That actually increases the COSTS of airlines and those do get passed on more to the rich as they travel a lot more inefficiently. They also can’t evade costs, but they can taxes.
You might be misunderstanding my comment: They can increase costs if they want, but they should take the costs away elsewhere. I have no problem with a train ticket being 10€ and a plane ticket being 120€ instead of the other way around.
But this will lead to a plane ticket being (as an example) 80€ and the train ticket continuing to be 120€. While they do make more money off of 1st class and stuff, they still need to make a chunk of the cost off of 2nd class. Especially on more local (e.g. inside the country or just one over), where there often is just one class in the plane (And maybe there is business).
A carbon tax does a better job at incentivizing low-carbon alternatives at all scales, from trains and more efficient airplanes down to e-bikes.
I think planes or to be precise their fuel aren’t even taxed normally
