French Transport Minister Clément Beaune has called for the restriction of private jet flights because of their huge contribution to climate change. He added to an increasingly heated debate in France over measures needed to save energy and limit global warming.
“Without resorting to demagoguery or launching random attacks, there are some behaviors that are no longer acceptable,” Beaune, who is close to President Emmanuel Macron, told Le Parisien newspaper over the weekend. “I think we should act to regulate private jet flights.”
While there may be urgent business trips, private jet flights cannot be “just for the comfort of individuals” given the efforts required of ordinary people by Macron, Beaune said.
Some green and left-wing politicians, who have formed the biggest opposition bloc in the French National Assembly since the June elections, have called for a complete ban on the use of private jets by business people and the wealthy and say they want to propose a bill in the coming months.
“I Fly Bernard” [Eu voo Bernard], one of several recently opened Twitter accounts, has gained more than 60,000 followers in its campaign to track flights, name and shame private jet users. The account name is a reference to the founder of the LVMH group, Bernard Arnault, the richest person in Europe.
“It’s time to ban private jets,” Julien Bayou, the Greens’ national secretary, said last week. “It’s the measure that would penalize the fewest people for the greatest and most immediate impact on the climate,” he told the daily Libération.
Public awareness of climate change and rising fuel costs instigated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine surged in France during a summer of extreme drought, wildfires and high gasoline and diesel prices.
Macron and his ministers urged citizens to save energy and are preparing legislation to accelerate investment in renewable energy. They don’t want to be seen asking the common people to make sacrifices while allowing the rich to live their lives undisturbed.
“The idea is not to impose a ban or infringe on freedoms,” said a government official. “But there’s a real problem here if we’re going to ask ordinary people to turn down the heat and turn off the lights in winter, and then someone takes a flight from Paris to Nice for pleasure.”
Beaune wants to raise the issue at a meeting of European Union transport ministers in October and said it would be more effective to have an EU-wide carbon tax system or regulation of the use of private jets than a purely French solution.
A model might be the French law’s clause on climate change and resilience that should limit domestic commercial flights when the distance can be covered by train in less than two and a half hours. However, that part of the law was watered down by the Senate to allow for short flights where most passengers were connecting from other flights, and has yet to be implemented.
Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves
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