A Virtual Air Flight Tax
Author: Stewart Hartley
What NEED does this meet?
Anyone who flies on business or pleasure and feels even a wee bit guilty about the environmental damage incurred and would like to offset it.
What is the APPROACH?
Simply a set of links of sites to which flyers can make donations, plus a breakdown of the ‘value’ of a flight. In other words, what is the environmental cost of a flight to Mallorca or Miami. PayPal or similar could link to these sites.
What are the BENEFITS to people?
It wouldn’t make lives easier as such, except morally (which may not be a bad thing in itself). It would allow people to take an active part in working to reverse climate change, it would give some empowerment to those who feel disempowered while providing much-needed cash to those organisations which are trying to make a change.
What is the COMPETITION?
Similar services? Not that I know of on a world-wide level. I got the idea when coming back from a trip to Morocco. I was planning on travelling by train but was so exhausted I opted to fly from Málaga to Santander. I did feel bad about flying and donated a small sum to Ecologistas en Acción here in Spain. I am sure there are many other organisations around the planet which could benefit from this.
What BUDGETS & LOGISTICS are required?
It could be done for around €3,000 I expect, and most of the work would involve getting the site known to NGOs and others who work in the environmental field.
Maintainence would be minimal and volunteers could do it.
There’s Future Forests and Climate Care ( http://www.co2.org/ ) who do this already.
According to the data ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_efficiency#Fuel_efficiency_in_transportation )
commuter trains and commercial airliners aren’t terribly different in their fuel efficiency per person. Note that the data in the referenced table includes 20% empty seats for airlines. When adjusted for flights packed as full as sardine cans, which is all I can find in the U.S. these days, that works out to 42.25 mpg/person. A train is already so massive that the human cargo is a very minimal adder to efficiency, so while it may increase a small amount (the data doesn’t say anything about occupancy assumptions for commuter trains) it will not vastly effect the outcome either way.
Who does the money go to?
Ian points out that rail travel is as inefficient as air travel, but rail fuel is taxed, air fuel is not.
Alexei asks ‘who does the money go to’? That’s to be decided, but there are a lot of NGOs out there doing good work and who need support. Who decides? And according to what criteria? These are good questions and I would venture to suggest that those who would run my proposed site would be the best folks to make that decision. Of course, the orgs that could be supported would have to be transparent re their aims and funding, but that, although problematical, is not beyond solution.
Francis writes re a couple of orgs which already have schemes. Thanks for the info and I will look into them to see if they have useful ideas.
I recently attended a discussion on Carbon Trading Schemes – given by (I think) Carbon Trade Watch (http://www.carbontradewatch.org/) who were sharing some strong concerns about the way current Carbon Trading / ofset schemes are run.
Apparantly – much of the ofset trading is entirely unregulated – which can lead to particular forrestry planting ofsets being sold multiple-times – and, many of the projects which are used as carbon ofset as projects in the global south which are implemented in place without consideration of local needs or wishes.
Now – whether that means Carbon Ofset / Trading as an idea is flawed and this idea could do more harm than good – or – whether this sets a challenge to create a carbon offset system which avoids these flaws and problems – I don’t know… any thoughts?
Hi this is a question for Stewart Hartley. You say that Rail fuel is taxed, but I can’t find out anywhere how much tax the train operators pay. Even HM Revenue and Customs don’t seem to know, although the bloke I spoke to thought that they would be able to claim back any tax paid. If that is the case, then if rail doesn’t pay any tax (and gets a massive subsidy) and the latest aircraft are almost as fuel efficient, then I’m not sure the environmental argument is as strong as we orginally thought.
Dear Stewart and other contributors,
at Treeflights.com we have tried to address some of the problems with carbon offset schemes.!.We dont promise carbon neutrality as it will take trees many decades to re-absorb the CO2 in question.2. We have no corporate affiliation.3. We do all the planting ourselves.4. We only plant deciduous trees.
Hope this is of some use.
Thanks, Ru.