[_ph_]

Good question. Currently fuel for international flights isn't taxed at all, as far as I know. Which explains the popularity of flying. Fuel for cars costs several times more, at least here in Europe.

Starting to tax airplane fuel would be an important step towards reducing the CO2 output. Possibly that would trigger a switch to synthetic and carbon neutral fuels.

[peyton]

It’s less than 2% of global CO2 emissions. If your tax scheme shaved off 15% of demand, you’d be saving 0.3% of global CO2 emissions—equivalent to a few months of global emissions growth.

[runarberg]

The thing is that we have failed miserably at reducing our carbon emissions, and we are simply out of time at the moment. Any action we do is already too late. All we can do now is mitigate the worst effects.

There will be a global cost scheme for carbon at some point in the future. I hope it will be a simple tax (imposed by each state by some international agreements; although some weird cap-and-trade scheme with limited effect is probably more likely given how governments are behaving) and I wouldn’t be surprised if it is mostly in effect by the time Boom plains are in commercial operations.

Whatever the scheme there will probably not be an exception for international flights (I’m guessing countries will be focusing their efforts on exempting their militaries). The thing is that every industry is going to try to get a discount, and that is simply not possible (we are in an emergency after all). So it doesn’t matter if it only shaves of 0.3% of global emissions (which honestly would be a disaster and not acceptable in the long run). What matters is that all industries (except the arms industry; lets be realistic here) will have to suffer equally for their sustained pollution.