France Bans Short-haul Flights To Cut Carbon Emissions - Slashdot

Posted by msmash

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  Does this apply to the private jets of politicians and celebrities or only for commercial flights?

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  • This particular policy only applies to commercial flight. However, two former presidents successively banned THEIR OWN flights, but could not continue the policy due to being struck down by Courts and advisors. First, President Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-2012) decided to never use the Presidency's Airbus A330-200 and use commercial Air France flights instead. The policy was struck down by the Court of Auditors a year later for actually costing MORE than using the Presidency jet (because Presidents don't fly alone and need space; booking half a commercial flight costed more numerically than using the existing jet. Second, president Francois Hollande (2012-2017) decided to always use the train rather than the Government's Dassault Falcon 900B / Falcon 7X and using his Citroen DS5 for his internal travels (already an upgrade, he normally used a scooter when he was a mere congressman) (and cutting the President salary by 30%). Despite being praised by the Court of Auditors for saving 7 million in a year, the policy was discontinued for being impractical due to the high responsibilities of the President and his need to stay in constant contact. He finally started using the Presidency car which is equipped with satellite communications with the army headquarters, which became necessary as France engaged in the Mali war).

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    Let's hope private short-hauls are taxed heavily to discourage them.

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      Let's hope private short-hauls are taxed heavily to discourage them.

      People with their own planes are not going to be "discouraged" by cost. Just another way to separate the 1% from the plebes even further.

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        They will if the cost is high enough and, when it comes to taxes, France's record shows it is definitely up to that challenge!

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    France is going to ban Track races and marathons to reduce carbon foot print. Then..Citizens with an odd numbered age are allowed to exhale every 4th second of the hour. Those with even ages can exhale on every 4th second beginning with the 2nd second of the hour. we have to strive to reduce our foot print. also any govt workers are exempt.

    Yep...

    Sounds to me like they're trying to make it to where no one wants to live in France anymore...??

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    • Re:

      Way ahead of you on that one.

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      The 35 hour work week, right to disconnect.and 5 weeks of vacation sound awful. This must be the final nail in the coffin.

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    It's not organ harvesting, it's just an involuntary carbon footprint reduction program

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    Next, this will be rubber-stamped in Brussels as EU nationwide policy and another excuse for gouging giant fines out of American companies. Profit!

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    Using Decimal time [wikipedia.org] of course.

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    When problems are ignored the cost to fix them rises. You're wagging your finger in the wrong direction.

• Far too many greenies are bad at math so yell for all kinds of "symbolism over substance" projects that have essentially zero impact on emissions, or sometime even make things worse. Making aviation out of something other than fossil fuel is doable now, and the cost (currently twice) would plummet if done at massive scale.

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    So would you like to fly on a battery operated plane? I'm having visions of that scene in Saving Private Ryan where they welded a big steel plate into the floor of a glider and the outcome.

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      No, I'd like to fly on a plane with biofuel, done deal being made right now. Current cost is 2X traditional aviation fuel but doing at massive scale of course would be cheap. And if we're doing that, why not make cars and trucks run on it, EV is sucky in some situations but ICE is nice.

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        Making biofuel while the wind blows is a task for which we could use those fluctuating renewables that Greens are so fond of.

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        Ice isn't nice. It's crap every way except when you need to do very long journeys in a very big hurry.

        They are otherwise high maintenance, dump pollution out right where the car is, require taking a journey just to refuel the thing, weak acceleration, prone to catching fire, and so on. The only useful thing is that they refuel fast.

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        Biofuel requires water and land resources. We have John Kerry flying around in his private jet telling everyone that agriculture is now one of the biggest offenders of carbon emissions. And the EPA is also demanding we stop using water in our dishwashers and clothes washers. Meanwhile the EU is set to ban imports that do not meet certain land conservation policies.

        This is why I don't pay any attention to environmental doomsayers. Everything is bad. Every solution violates a different environmentalist's

    • Re:

      Yes. I would like to fly in a battery operated plane. Batteries and electric motors are pretty proven technologies. Are we supposed to be scared to or something? It would probably be just as safe, or safer than one with internal combustion engines or jet engines, and probably quieter as well. With present battery technology flight range would be limited, but that's exactly what this article is about: short-haul flights.

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        "Yes. I would like to fly in a battery operated plane. Batteries and electric motors are pretty proven technologies."

        Also, the hundreds of planes crashed the last 50 year had no batteries, so they're not that secure.

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        Good luck with that.

        "The ES-30 has a maximum range of nearly 500 miles, though any flight more than 124 miles requires the help of a sustainable aviation-fuel-using generator on board. In hybrid mode, the plane would emit carbon emissions at a rate 50 percent less than its solely jet-fueled counterparts, Forslund said. The cabin noise would be far lower than what commercial passengers are used to, he added."

        original link [washingtonpost.com]

        Of course that is conditioned on the batteries not being degraded. Also "sustainabl

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          If "sustainable aviation fuel" exists then why not use that in conventional aircraft and skip over the idea of an experimental hybrid?

          The US Navy has demonstrate a process to synthesize carbon-neutral jet fuel using nuclear power with carbon and hydrogen extracted from seawater. They estimated the cost at the time the presentation was made as being about double that of jet fuel derived from fossil fuels, and there being plenty of room to lower costs with further development of the technology. Even if the

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    and if fancy-pants kerosene can be done (bio av fuel), why not diesel?

    yah know what, I'd prefer an ICE engine with bio fuel over electric any day of the week. for half the U.S. population, the EV battery will use up 4 percent a day in winter just to keep itself warm so car can go

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      That doesn't sound right. A winter country like Norway had 83.3% EV market share in April, as well as 12.3% hybrids. We have plenty of cold winters here... I've had EVs for 6 years now, and they work great all year round.

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    "Green" does not mean "Working to stop climate change".
    
    Every normal, decent person is the latter now, while the Greens are still busy fighting against men, nuclear power and the fact that women do not have penises.

    • Re:

      You may not have noticed that the head of the UK Liberal Democrats, Sir Ed Davy, when asked about your last point, said with an air of surprise that he was being asked such a silly question, that of course some women have penises.

      Ed (he was plain Ed then) when a government minister under the coalition between the Liberals and the Tories, explained that bills would not rise under the green energy policies he was advocating.

      The reason was that the price of energy was going to rise so much that people would u

      • Re:

        Not Sure If Serious, but I went agoogling to check it out anyway.
        
        I found this, which is very much anti-Mr Davy, but does not have him saying what you say he said:
        
        https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/ed-davey-s-energy-fantasies/
        
        Citation ?

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      > the Greens are still busy fighting against... the fact that women do not have penises.

      That doesn't sound like the green party I know. I'm pretty sure they would FIGHT for women with penises.
      (Then turn around and say nothing when a 50 year old man in the girls change room flashes children.)

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        "fighting against... the fact that women do not have penises."
        
        Equates to:
        
        "fighting for... the fact that women do have penises."
        
        So we are in agreement.

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          Judith : [on Stan's desire to be a mother] Here! I've got an idea: Suppose you agree that he can't actually have babies, not having a womb - which is nobody's fault, not even the Romans' - but that he can have the *right* to have babies.
          
          Francis : Good idea, Judith. We shall fight the oppressors for your right to have babies, brother... sister, sorry.
          
          Reg : What's the *point*?
          
          Francis : What?
          
          Reg : What's the point of fighting for his right to have babies, when he can't have babies?
          
          Francis :

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            This piece of prophetic brilliance was in the news recently, because wokeists warned him not to stage it.
            
            Stop woke, it's getting silly.
            
            https://archive.ph/rYU5U

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              I suggest a better approach is to stop misusing woke. Woke is a simple word for a simple concept that simple people seem to misunderstand willfully. Woke means you have woken up to how prevalent racism is in our society. To say that you are anti-woke means you are pro-racist.

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      Almost every democracy has a green party. Not all of those are American.

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        How many countries have a Green party that is fighting climate change and is doing that by supporting ( or at least not actively opposing ) nuclear power when it can help, and has not been taken over by wokeists and/or feminazis?
        
        I suspect the number is small.

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          I only know about the US and Canadian Green Parties. The US one is generally pretty progressive, the Canadian one is fairly conservative outside of environmental issues. I do not know what positions they take on specific non-environmental policies.

  • You know what's even more efficient than miracle fuel? Electric trains.

• Most passenger rail in France is owned and operated by the government (SNCF). I'm sure the state-run rail businesses will appreciate not having to compete with airplanes.
• ...where the ( cost + reasonable profit) price of a train ticket is less than that of a plane ticket.
  
  Fair competition.
  • 1 hidden comment

  • Re:

    "...where the ( cost + reasonable profit) price of a train ticket is less than that of a plane ticket.

    Fair competition."

    Really? The train companies have to pay for railway stations and the rails between them while the airlines pay a small fee to use both airport and the air?

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    • Re:

      Yes.
      So the railway stations and the rails between them and the airport fees are part of the cost.

• We're losing our monopoly on pointless, ineffective climate policies that serve only to make certain politicians seem more electable while having no actual effect on the climate itself.

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    Airplanes are the single biggest waste of resources. The fuel for one long flight could heat 150 homes for an entire winter.

• "We need to make a pause in our effort to reduce our carbon emissions". Signed by : ma€ron
  Question: how do you pause an action that has barely started ?

  Remember: you can't trust a word from his mouth. Proved too many times.

• It is symbolic. And political. Short haul flights are common and often not expensive (not sure about these French ones) so they're used by quite a few people. This is meant to make people more directly aware of the need for carbon based solutions. Assuming this is done correctly (politically I mean), then it builds voter support for bigger carbon initiatives.

  I'm not saying they're doing this correctly, this could backfire. But I see it as a political move first and foremost.

• Train - 100% cash stays home; Air travel - the cash just flys away - even on domestic routes.
• As per Le Monde [lemonde.fr] the forbidden flights were 2.5% of domestic flights, and domestic flights are 0.5% of french CO2 emissions. So those flights are 0.0125% of french CO2 emissions.

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    A) You are confusing whether you agree with something with whether it is virtue signaling. People you disagree with can be completely sincere. B) No one is claiming that this is a magic bullet that is going to deal with all of France's climate issues. There is no magic bullet because CO2 is produced by many different things. But each step we take helps.

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      Sure, and I don't disagree with that. But it's something they were discussing during Covid (2020). That was part of the discussion to bailout (yet another time) Air France back then. My point is more, this is a retribution thing, with no clear cost/benefit analysis, beyond "look at us we're cancelling flights, we are on the good side".

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    That's true, nobody wanted to fly those routes anyway because the TGV is cheaper and more comfortable.

    I wish the USA had good trains like that.

    • Re:

      The TGV is pretty amazing. When it runs. And sometimes you have a layover (say flying from abroad to a secondary french city) and you're already at CDG or ORY, and flying is actually way more convenient than another means of transportation. The US has a very different geography and population density. You'd think the Amtrak Boston/NY/DC would be the best use case for high speed train (the rest of the country, not so much), but sadly that line sucks ass.
• I suspect this may be more about changing people's travelling habits, i.e. switch from air to rail, & in doing so providing more revenue & incentive for building out the rail network better. In other words, it's the govt simply favouring one mode of transport over another. You know, like the USA favours cars above all else even though it's arguably the least efficient feasible way for most people to move around.
  
  Trains rather than planes. Sounds OK to me. Have you been on a French high speed train

  • Re:

    Agreed. If anything, given how few flights are impacted, it seems really more about cementing behaviors rather than changing them. That said, it's going to require some significant infrastructure or more painful changes if they want to impact the connecting flights numbers: like a convenient way to transition from a train station to an airport. Otherwise, you will still have people flying from those cities and connecting to Paris for long-haul routes.

• I'm curious about the status of connecting flights. For example, will a passenger travelling Lyon-Paris-New York have to take the train for the Lyon-Paris leg?

  Even if connecting flights are allowed, they probably won't be cost-effective to operate if they're only serving feeder traffic.