Why Electric Planes are Inevitably Coming | Wendover Productions

Carbon doesn't have a cost for airlines.

With a few exceptions, emitting more carbon does not cost the airlines anything, but it enables them to make more profit, so the theoretically correct thing for airlines to do is to emit the amount of carbon that enables them to generate the most profit regardless of environmental consequences.

Some say airlines care about climate change for public relations, and they're right, but only to an extent.

Airlines clearly posture as caring about their carbon footprint because consumers increasingly care about their carbon footprint, so being viewed as a greener airline translates to being a more desirable choice for consumers, who, unlike for-profit businesses, do care about what's morally right to an extent.

However, net carbon zero is expensive, biofuel development is expensive, sustainable aircraft development is expensive, all more expensive than would make sense if airlines and aircraft developers exclusively cared about PR.

So, the reason why airlines are starting to care about climate change is because they're terrified of the R word: regulation.

It's started already.

In France, the National Assembly has passed a bill that would ban short-haul flights on routes that could be traveled in two and a half hours or less by train.

Here's the worst thing for airlines.

Measures like this make absolute perfect sense.

With airports located away from city centers, security lines, less reliable departure times, and more, no journey that would take two and a half hours by train could reasonably and reliably be accomplished faster by plane.

The bill would still allow these shorter flights to operate for the purposes of connections to longer-haul flights, but passengers just couldn't book the short flights by themselves.

So, there's no real downside, but there's the massive upside of shifting travelers onto trains, which in the case of France emit 77 times less carbon per passenger on journeys of this length.

While this bill faces an uphill battle as it needs to pass through the more conservative French Senate before enactment, it's no wonder why similar measures have been seriously considered or implemented in the Belgian region of Wallonia, Austria, the Netherlands, and by countless employers globally.

The problem for airlines is that they just don't have any good arguments against regulations like these.

A move away from the shortest-haul, most replaceable flights will be the start, but it won't end there.