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Earth Transportation

France Bans Short-haul Flights To Cut Carbon Emissions (bbc.com) 132

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
France has banned domestic short-haul flights where train alternatives exist, in a bid to cut carbon emissions. BBC: The law came into force two years after lawmakers had voted to end routes where the same journey could be made by train in under two-and-a-half hours. The ban all but rules out air travel between Paris and cities including Nantes, Lyon and Bordeaux, while connecting flights are unaffected. Critics have described the latest measures as "symbolic bans." Laurent Donceel, interim head of industry group Airlines for Europe (A4E), told the AFP news agency that "banning these trips will only have minimal effects" on CO2 output. He added that governments should instead support "real and significant solutions" to the issue. Airlines around the world have been severely hit by the coronavirus pandemic, with website Flightradar24 reporting that the number of flights last year was down almost 42% from 2019. The French government had faced calls to introduce even stricter rules. Further reading: France Unveils Plan To Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions By 50 Percent By 2030.
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France Bans Short-haul Flights To Cut Carbon Emissions More

France Bans Short-haul Flights To Cut Carbon Emissions

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  • Who does this apply to? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by NFN_NLN ( 633283 ) on Wednesday May 24, 2023 @01:10PM (#63548419)

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

    • Re:Who does this apply to? (Score:5, Informative)

      by test321 ( 8891681 ) on Wednesday May 24, 2023 @02:28PM (#63548629)

      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).

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by tchdab1 ( 164848 )

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

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

      Ha ha no. This, like all such laws, is only for the little people. Those who are wealthy enough to own or charter private jets are exempt from all climate/carbon legislation.

  • 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.

    • Re:Government Owned Railroad (Score:5, Informative)

      by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Wednesday May 24, 2023 @02:07PM (#63548571)

      They also own 15.9% of Air France and they also own the airports.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        And they say Europe isn't socialist... The French government also owns EDF, which operates all its nuclear plants and sets retail electricity prices. The government decided to limit price rises to 4% when the gas crisis hit.

        • "And they say Europe isn't socialist... The French government also owns EDF, which operates all its nuclear plants and sets retail electricity prices. The government decided to limit price rises to 4% when the gas crisis hit."

          And they doubled the price for Brexit Britain.

  • Uh-oh. The United States is falling behind. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Chiasmus_ ( 171285 ) on Wednesday May 24, 2023 @01:19PM (#63548451) Journal

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Fly Swatter ( 30498 )
      Airplanes are the single biggest waste of resources. The fuel for one long flight could heat 150 homes for an entire winter.

      • And the fuel equivalent if the passengers would use a car for the same route, would heat 450 homes an entire winter.

        So, what exactly is your point? That home heating with oil is expensive/resource consuming?

        Well, that is one reason why oil based heating are forbidden in new houses in Germany, since a while.

  • "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.

    • Replying to myself to add this :
      How long does it take to remove the meaning of this ? [twitter.com]
      (sorry, France means French)

      And remember that this pr€sid€nt and his minister of ecology, sorry, "ecology", find perfectly normal to discuss around a +4C scenario (sorry again, international units, not based on the blood of horses).
      At +4C, we are dead, or at war we everybody seeking for the last inhabitable square kilometer.
      At a time where we are late, very late for the +1.5C scenario.

      I read that the ric

  • It's not about the carbon (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Whateverthisis ( 7004192 ) on Wednesday May 24, 2023 @01:59PM (#63548555)
    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by djb ( 19374 )

      They previously banned intercity bus travel, as it competed with the state own SNCF trains and they wanted to protect their income. How is this different?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      France's total emissions are less than 1% of the global total, so anything they do is going to be labelled as pointless virtue signalling that won't avert climate change.

      In fact there is a very good point to doing this. It sends a clear signal as to the way things are headed to investors. Put your money into low emission/net zero technology, or risk it simply being banned.

      It also sets a good example for how people can have a very high quality of life and great mobility, without short half flights. India is

      • Trains would be better environmentally, not economically. I can't speak to India's specific issue, but the challenge with trains is geography of the rail lines; you're limited to what you can do based on the hills and mountains, and to expand capacity you need to add a lot of infrastructure (more rail lines). India already has the 4th largest rail network in the world, but some places just aren't feasible to reach by rail. Plus for international travel, India is surrounded by ocean to the South and the l

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Surely for trade, rail is a great option. Ship it to a port, rail to destination. Weight not nearly as big of an issue as with air.

          While there will always be some routes where trains are impractical, look at China and how it has done with both high speed rail for passengers and freight trains.

  • Virtue-signalling that doesn't move the needle? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by e065c8515d206cb0e190 ( 1785896 ) on Wednesday May 24, 2023 @03:17PM (#63548761)
    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.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by JoshuaZ ( 1134087 )
      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.
      • 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".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ichijo ( 607641 )

      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.

      • 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.

    • It is even worth.

      Connecting flights are exempt. E.g you want to fly Zurich to Nantes. The flight goes from Zurich to Paris. And you have a connecting flight from Paris to Nantes.

      As I see it, Parisians can not use that plane/flight, as there is no ticket sold anymore. However: the plane flies anyway.

      So I'm not sure there is any real saving in the end. Especially if you consider the airline having basically the same cost. As CO2 production is based on the weight and distance, I guess 30 passengers less, is no

    • Yeah, because if something doesn't magically solve a large portion of the problem we shouldn't consider this. In other news I hear my car is 0.00001% of emissions in my country so I may as well roll coal instead of getting an EV right? Because unless a difference solves world hunger it's not worth perusing, even if it is available to execute right now with simple policy?

      I have a new theory, every time someone calls something "virtue signalling" I conclude they are in fact an idiot.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It's not just the flights themselves though. People have to get to and from the airport. The airport is a massive industrial complex that requires a lot of energy to operate. If it gets too busy, they need to build another one, or at least add an extra runway.

      With European long distance high speed rail improving there should be fewer medium haul flights too, perhaps even allowing for some of the airport infrastructure to be mothballed.

      Shifting some of that traffic to rail does more than just prevent the emi

  • 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
    • 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.
      • In the EU, most airports have train services but they typically run to & from the city centre. If the final destination is far from the international airport that means getting the local airport service to the main city station to catch a high speed train. I'd still rather do that than do the whole airport thing.

        The other thing is that, at least in the EU, there's a wider distribution of a whole lot more high speed rail stations than there are airports (i.e. more likely to be nearer to where you want

    • Efficiency is in the eye of the beholder, because it depends on what parameters you want to include: e.g., convenience, user's time, reliability, hygiene, flexibility, comfort are just some that might be included in a car user's calculus of efficiency.

  • 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.

  • I'm seeing a disappointing amount of posturing here, people who obviously have no idea what kind of effect this will have are claiming that this will have no effect. Brilliant. Maybe we can do a little better than that: here [ourworldindata.org] is some data. Looks like flying accounts for 2.5% of carbon emissions globally, and short-haul flights are one third of that. That doesn't seem trivial, but flying accounts for a much larger percentage in rich countries like France. So how much is that?

    I'm having a little difficulty

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      I'm seeing a disappointing amount of posturing here, people who obviously have no idea what kind of effect this will have are claiming that this will have no effect.

      Probably because most posters are American and have no experience with the European train system. Most Americans, if they've ever ridden on a train, would have had to put up with Amtrak, which because of the way the US set up its rail network, sucks as it's primarily designed for freight. So passenger rail travel is an experience. Amtrak does ha

      • The point is that the fast trains also connect cities that (while one of them, or even both, might have an airport) have no flight connection.

        E.g. Karlsruhe - Paris. 2:30h in a tain, city center to city center. Even if there was a connection, I had 30+ minutes travel to the Karlsruhe Airport, and would end in the outscirts of Paris (actually Parisians would not call those towns belonging to Paris, Charles de Gaulle Airport e.g. is in Roissy-en-France, some 25km outside, the us needs nearly an hour to the ce

    • The world wide carbon emissions of flight is about 2%.
      No idea about France, but the post above indicates, the savings are below 1% of what the Flight pollution is aka somewhere at 0.000001% of France total pollution.

      Keep in mind: the ban is fo direct fights. But the exact same direct flight can be - and most of the time is - part of a connecting flight, so the plane flies anyway.

      We would now have to look, what the typical switching time from one plane to the other is, and how full they usually are and if th

  • Begin with the formula 1 team flights. (Score:3)

    by JamesTRexx ( 675890 ) on Wednesday May 24, 2023 @08:15PM (#63549339) Journal

    Proclaiming to be more aware about the motorsport, yet still flying everything from one end of the world to the other in between every race.

    Let's cut emmisions in there first.

  • Rearranging the deck chairs on the Queen Mary because you think it is the Titanic.

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