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!<p>Yet another case of the environmental Baptists providing cover for the polluting bootleggers.
It seems to be really complicated to reach consensus to change the EU Energy Taxation Directive, which currently prohibits taxation of commercial aviation fuel.<p>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...<p>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.<p>But maybe this time price controls will be different.
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%."<p>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.<p>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...
Starting in 2024 airlines will also need to pay to get carbon emission permits.
(<a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/eu-agrees-law-make-airlines-pay-more-pollute-2022-12-07/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/eu-agrees-law-m...</a>), with are now free.<p>I believe it will raise a bit prices in 2026 but not too much.
A better way to achieve the desired effect of fewer flying miles (if that is the intention) would be to increase fuel taxes etc.<p>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.
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???)<p>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:<p>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.
Short haul flights in Europe are too cheap, for sure. But trains are often too expensive, it's a problem on both sides.<p>I hope they tax planes more and use that money to subsidize rail.
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.<p>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?
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.
Sure just continue to make your life worse for no reason.<p>Trains aren't an alternative, especially when they take double the time a normal airplane would.
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.