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

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

no tax on aircraft fuel at all, making it effectively heavily subsidised compared to all other means of transport.

It's not just the fuel. There's the whole VAT-exempt thing (tickets, meals and all sorts of bits and pieces to do with the airline industry are VAT exempt or zero-rated), and the whole Duty Free thing, which work out to be about the same again on top of the fuel subsidy. The Duty Free thing isn't a lot of direct tax subsidy (<£1bn IIRC) but it's a highly geared subsidy in that it generates far more income than that for the airports (they don't make it easy to do the sums for obvious reasons, but with a bit of work you can see that the discount on Duty Free stuff is way less than 17.5%; and next to nobody would buy stuff there if it wasn't discounted at all).