Jetting off on holiday this summer? If you’re travelling through France next year, your trip will be a little more costly.
The country is the latest to introduce an “eco-tax”, which the French government estimates will raise €180 million (£161m) a year from flights taking off and landing from the country’s airports. Two per cent of the world’s man-made carbon emissions – around 860m tonnes of carbon dioxide – came from air travel in 2017.
Reuters reports that a levy of €1.50 (£1.35) will be charged on domestic and intra-European flights, while €3 (£2.50) will be charged on flights outside the European Union. A business class seat on a flight in the EU will include a €9 (£8) eco charge from next year, while a longer flight in business class will be €18 (£16) more expensive.
The tax will be used to generate revenue for the French government that will be spent on other forms of transport like trains, the transport ministry said. France’s tax change follows Sweden, which introduced a more punitive €40 (£36) carbon tax in April 2018 – and is part of an increasing awareness of the environmental damage of flights on our planet.
Greta Thunberg’s “Skolstrejk för klimatet” campaign has raised awareness of the carbon emissions involved in international travel. (Thunberg has recently travelled from her home in Sweden to London by train rather than take a flight.) France’s eco-tax is an attempt to tackle international air travel’s carbon emissions – but will a €1.50 (£1.35) charge really change people's behaviour?
“I’m not convinced it will make a difference,” says Sam Fankhauser, director of the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics and the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy. “I think it’s more a symbolic first step. One thing that people have learned with carbon taxes is start low and get people used to the idea before you ramp it up over time.”
Fankhauser isn’t sure that such a low charge will shift the method of transport for the majority of travellers – what’s called the price elasticity of demand, or the proportion of the total cost of a product or service that will make people change behaviours. Doubling the price of petrol today, for instance, isn’t likely to make a difference in the number of people on the roads tomorrow. They have to all get to work. But in the longer term, such a large increase would likely encourage people to buy different, more efficient cars.
Air France has already said the eco-tax would cost them an extra €60m (£53m) a year. “In the short term they’ll have to grin and bear it, but in the long term they’ll have to look at their attractiveness,” says Fankhauser. “They might buy more efficient planes. They’re much more price sensitive than passengers are. Passengers will still go on their holidays. That probably needs a bigger price signal.”
It’s an issue Maria Carvalho of South Pole, a carbon finance consultancy, sees as a problem. “As a flat rate, there’s no differentiation between a flight from Morocco and China even though they’ll have vastly different greenhouse gas emissions,” she says. “A carbon tax specifically will create differentiating factors based on how much greenhouse gas you emit.”
Traditional carbon taxes create incentives to change behaviour. “This, you could argue the rates are too low and that the person would just pay it,” says Carvalho. The low cost wouldn’t even encourage people to fly from other airports outside France – the extra cost in taking transport there would be more than the €3 (£2.70) levied for a standard international flight.
The eco-tax also isn’t in proportion with the emissions caused by business class travel, says Loughborough University aviation expert David Gleave. “The tax bias towards business class is not proportionate to the extra space, volume or mass part of fuel burn associated with that form of travel,” he says.
British Airways business class gives passengers roughly 50 per cent more space and baggage allowances are 50 percent greater, and at a rough rule of thumb 50 per cent more CO2 emissions. But the eco-tax difference is 600 per cent. “The tax is not proportionate to the emission on long haul either.”
The tax may be more of a nudge, however, to make us all more aware of the potential environmental impact our air travel has on the world. And even if it doesn’t do that, it may well be this is just the start of a bigger shift in the eco-tax – a starting point from which the charge will evolve. “I imagine they will increase the price in the long run,” says Fankhauser.
He points to another tax that started off as a pittance but increased over time and became an effective deterrent: the UK’s landfill tax, introduced in 1996, started at £7 per tonne of waste deposited at an officially run waste site. Today, you’ll pay £91.35 per tonne.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
