Big Surprise

[andrewducker]

I post saying that the government should make the decisions that individuals find hard, but are in our own best interests, and I get multiple comments from people saying "But I don't want things made hard for me."

Not a single week has gone past in the last few months, and not a month in the last 10 years when I haven't read more about the climate of the whole fucking planet going horribly wrong, because we're polluting it.  A large part of that pollution comes from flying machines inefficiently burning up hydrocarbons and releasing great wodges of Carbon Dioxide and Nitrogen Oxides at high altitude.

Imagine if every time you took a flight you had to grind up a couple of people and put them in the fuel tank.  You can bet that people would still be saying "But I want to see my family a lot."  At the _very_ least, airline fuel should be taxed enough to pay for the planting of trees to soak up the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide - at the moment there's no tax on aircraft fuel at all, making it effectively heavily subsidised compared to all other means of transport.

I'm sorry, but when the whole bloody planet is at stake, maybe we'll all have to make a few sacrifices.

Comments

[communicator.livejournal.com]

I completely agree with you about fiinding a way. But the problem with air fuel tax is that if we tried to levy it the big airlines would just go and refuel in the Cayman Islands or Liberia or somewhere like that. I don't know what the answer is.

[andrewducker]

Tricky to do for internal UK flights going back and forth between Edinburgh and London... And large detours would also deter people, so it wouldn't be an entirely bad thing.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

The large airlines have sufficient routes to get around that. A plane would do a couple of trips from say London to Glasgow, then it's next flight would be to Amsterdam and back. The result would be to place a heavy burden on smaller airlines.

Rather than a direct tax on airline fuel, if you wanted to implement a scheme such as this, the solution would be to put a tax on airline tickets. You could have a variable rate depending on distance travelled or some such criteria.

[greenfieldsite.livejournal.com]

Exactly - there is not only one solution.

For example, for security reasons airlines keep track of exactly who is flying. It shouldn't be too hard (I'd have thought) to give everyone one tax-free return flight each year and then have a tax charge on all subsequent tickets.

[missedith01.livejournal.com]

Put a tax on airline fuel as its imported?