By charging a tax upon fossil fuel use it discourages the use of fossil fuels. It uses the market to control pollution and companies would be forced to consider the full environmental cost of their actions due to it impacting the price.
But would it be enough to make airlines relinquish lucrative slots?
I personally feel the problem is more related to a bogus slot allocation/deallocation policy that forces an airline to fly an empty plane around to hold a slot. Could they not just remove that rather pointless requirement, and have some sort of market based approach to auction slots for a set period (say 1 year at a time)?!
> Could they not just remove that rather pointless requirement, and have some sort of market based approach to auction slots for a set period (say 1 year at a time)?!
The whole point of the current system is to combat old carriers that had local monopolies and refused to allow competition ( e.g. British Airways at Heathrow). Such a carrier could afford to spend money to prevent competitors from flying from their hubs, making themselves the only ( and thus more expensive) option.
The regulation is good, it just needs more fine tuning ( e.g. they should add a minimal passenger and/or cargo load, to make sure the flights aren't there just to keep the slots and are actually used).
They already did, the slot needs to "only" be used at 50% (it was 80-90% before), but obviously that isn't enough ( which couldn't have been easily predicted though, the pandemic is constantly evolving).
If you make fuel more expensive tickets will be more expensive and these empty flights will be a quite similar proportion of cost for airlines because the tax is the same with or without passengers.
You genuinely think a carbon tax would cost more than all the other costs associated with flying an empty plane? Pilots, cabin crew, ground services, fuel, depreciation of the aircraft, landing fees, ATC service fees, etc?
It wouldn’t be. The massive cost already isn’t stopping it.
