France calls for minimum price on European flights
France's transport minister called Wednesday for a minimum price for plane flights in Europe to battle climate change.
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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?
a few mm is fine, maglevs are cool
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.
Right, forgot that Iceland, Greenland, and Faroe Islands are technically not part of Europe.
Edit: yes, I know that the Faroes are not on the other side of the Atlant, but they are far enough away to be annoying to build tracks to.
Iceland and the Faroe Islands are normally grouped with Europe, and Greenland with North America.
Exactly! While Greenland and Iceland are geographically considered American (or half Amarican, half European for Iceland) , they are geopolitically considered European countries.
This means that a European rail, connecting all European countries, would need a rail to Greenland, which is on the other side of the Atlant.
Now, I'm not arguing against trains, they are a useful tool for the right job, but planes fill a different role (small load but high speed transport to hard-to-reach locations) that trains cannot fulfill in the same capacity. So instead of abolishing planes, we should try to force them to be more environmentally viable.
Thank you.
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.
I get what you're saying but look how absurdly difficult it is to make high speed rail, the UK are no strangers to making trains but HS2 has been a huge disaster with endless extra costs, ecoprotesters delaying it and etc - it's currently expected that stage one will open between 2029 and 2033, they started planning in 2009. Rail is not a quick and easy solution, it's also cost £100 Billion and the options to upgrade it are incredibly limited.
Meanwhile in Washington state they're building a facility which uses carbon from the air to make jet fuel, the us military already tested it in all their jets and it works great - it's not especially difficult chemistry so likely to be commercialised at a competitive price point. It doesn't require engine modifications or anything like that, can be made with excess power from renewables at peek times to lower the cost even more and make wind and solar much better investments.
We've been using blended biofuel in aviation for over a decade without anyone really noticing, we've also been switching to electrofuels - Obama created ARPA-E the same year HS2 was unveiled, they had some significant successes such as using co2 as the fuel source (though got shifted to focus on fracking without anyone caring which is a real shame). There are various projects around the world creating efuel already with plenty more in the planning and development stages.
It's not a perfect solution but it's an actionable solution and a great stopgap, it could even be the boost carbon sequestration needs to become a profitable technology which leads to new markets being established and us actually starting to pull measurable quantities of carbon from the air.
I love trains and I hate flying, but if we can make carbon neutral fuels then being able to zoom over the top of beautiful ecosystems rather than dissect them with steel rails would be better for everything, building all the infrastructure for a giant rail network would create huge amounts of emissions and take decades to get to the point where the daily savings Vs cars has paid off, it would put us deeper in the hole and probably way past the point where net zero can help.