People took fewer flights amiddle of the covid-19 pandemic, which helped to lower carbon pollution due to aviation by about 60%. Now, France tries to make part of the reduction permanent.
The French National Assembly on Saturday passed legislation that would ban all domestic short-distance connections flights that can be replaced by an existing train route that takes less than two and a half hours. The bill will now go to the country’s senate for final approval. If it passes there, it will end popular domestic flights, such as those from Paris to Bordeaux and Strasbourg. However, the measure makes an exception for connecting flights, such as those through the Charles de Gaulle major airport.
Before the spread of covid-19 began, the air release was strongly upward. A body of the United Nations prediction that carbon pollution by aircraft cwould triple by 2050. The pandemic put a dent in growth, but experts made it clear that world leaders must codify permanent regulations to ensure we do not fry the planet with aviation.
Short-haul flights are a good starting point. Some estimates suggest they are the carbon intensive form of air travel. The bill – which is part of of a greater effort to ensure that France fulfills its commitment to the Paris Agreement to cut carbon emissions 40% below 1990 levels teen 2030– makes sense by replacing carbon-heavy flights with lower polluting tracks.
France is not the first European country to curb short-haul flights. Last year, the Austrian government a tax imposed on all flights of less than 350 kilometers (287 miles) last June and banned domestic flights that could be replaced by a three-hour train ride. Officials in the Netherlands are also considering a ban on short domestic flights since 2013. In 2019, the Dutch parliament actually voted to ban the 150 kilometers flight route from Amsterdam to Brussels. But the benchmark was never implemented because it was found that it is not in line with European Cexemption regulations for exemption.
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France’s move to the country less than a year terms included in its covid-19 financial recovery packages which requires airlines, in particular the company Air France-KLM, to reduce their pollution in exchange for economic rescue operations. Under the conditions was do not compete with less polluting forms of travel such as rail.
Yet the new flight ban is on the verge of approval perhaps to let Air France-KLM off the hook too much. In 2019, France’s Citizens’ Convention on Climate, a group created by President Emmanuel Macron that included 150 members of the public, actually proposed to get rid of all flights where train travel from below four hours were available. But at Saturday’s meeting, Air France-KLM objected to the measure, citing how badly their profits were affected by the restrictions on covid-19 flying.
At the meeting, Danièle Obono, a Member of Parliament for the left-wing party La France Insoumise, said the government’s plan to move from a four-hour limit would save the three routes that emit the most greenhouse gases: Paris-Nice, Paris-Toulouse, [and] Paris-Marseille. “But the Minister of Transport, Jean-Baptiste Djebbari tell MPs that the two-and-a-half hours limit was preferred because “four hours is the risk of isolating enclosed areas. The Macron administration is no stranger to implementing policies that burn people in remote areas, implemented – and then step back–advertisementdisastrous gas tax in 2018. But it seems they are going against the will of the people here in the service of aviation industry.
Personally, I think Obono has the right idea. But even the watered down bill looks quite better than anything weighed in the US Until last year, our country did not even have any regulations on air pollution passed in 2020 is a joke. So, from where I sit, the partner still seems like a good first step– as long as it is actually finalized in the sbetower.