The purpose of the tax is to recover the external cost of flying.

Ideally there are alternatives to flying, but it's not a requirement: as long as flying has an environmental price, recovering it through tax is a decent logic.

We can discuss the offered price, or how the tax could be structured, but I don't think the approach is unreasonable on its face.

But close to nothing is being recovered. We would recover more or less the same if we introduced a tax on bad weather to be paid by those suffering from it.

The money collected with this tax may or may not reduce air travel and will be spent on government employees, welfare distributions, healthcare, roads, military etc as all other taxes and only a fraction will be spent on improving the environment.

They could destroy the money collected from the tax and it would still improve the environment: the tax will discourage people from flying and encourage people to use alternatives, which helps the environment.

As I write this, I imagine people are rushing to their phones to cancel their transatlantic business class tickets because of the 18 euro surcharge.

I’ll be traveling via barge for the foreseeable future because of this tax.

All of this has been studied and modeled extensively. It's called elasticity of demand. The fact that professional trading firms are selling airline stock, pushing the price down, shows you that yes, this will indeed have an effect.

The stock price of Air France barely took a hit, and already rebounded.

Yes, but that doesn’t ‘recover’ anything

It should be less about generating revenue and more about preventing a loophole. The loophole is that it's possible for one party to make a profit at the expense of everyone else. That means there's an incentive / reward for destructive behavior.

IMHO, though, the tax should be just enough to neutralize that incentive. Anything more and you are selectively penalizing one industry, which I don't think is fair. Airlines didn't invent the concept of burning fuel to power machinery; society did, chose it as the basis for all industrial technology, and used it for everything. Air travel is just one thing on that list.

Also, the airlines were not the only ones who benefited. More or less, we all did. If ticket prices always included the carbon cost, then your business would have had to pay a higher price to fly you to that business meeting. And you would have had to pay a higher price to go on that vacation or visit those relatives.

We all had a party and trashed the place. We should all clean it up together.

So far that reason, to the extent that we can fix things with government action (funding research, etc.), I think the costs should be taken that out of the general fund. That not only everyone pays for what everyone benefited from, it also means it can be progressive and have other attributes of good tax policy.

"But close to nothing is being recovered. We would recover more or less the same if we introduced a tax on bad weather to be paid by those suffering from it."

This is a good point, actually ...

If the tax is punitive enough that it results in a meaningful decrease in miles flown then it has a positive environmental impact, but it's difficult to imagine the taxes being that punitive. That's probably politically impossible.

In order for this to "recover" something, as is being discussed, you'd need a way to convert these dollars into carbon sinks of some kind - which isn't, itself, without controversy ...

I am personally in favor of removing subsidies to air travel and increasing taxes on miles flown such that the impact would be noticeable, but again, that's a tall order, politically.

It’s a bit tricky but as I far as I know France gov can’t by design reserve the profit from any tax to a specific use. It’s all pooled for the global budget, and the pooled money is dispatched according to the agreed plan each year.

But any new project requiring significant financement needs to propose actions to balance its cost to get approved, thus in this instance the project to invest in roads and rails is backed by this tax.

The projected tax amount just needs to be roughly the same as the new project’s cost.

Also, expect more European countries to follow. The Dutch government is intent on doing this too; either on their own, or (preferably) on a European scale.

I doubt they would do it on their own, many of the trips via schiphol don’t have Dutch endpoints, which is Europe’s biggest hub.

If it is only NL and France, it will just bankrupt KLM/AirFrance. It needs to be EU wide imho.

How does it being EU-wide help KLM/AirFrance? It's not like people is going to take flights out of London or Berlin instead of Paris or Amsterdam to avoid the tax.

Or maybe you mean that if it's only NL and France it will just bankrupt KLM/AirFrance while it is's EU-wide it will bankrupt them all.

Carbon taxes are the most efficient way to let the market work out technical solutions to the climate crisis. Period.

If you're worried about regressive taxation, check out the fee-and-dividend model, where all revenue is returned to households [0]. This means that for most "regular" people, the carbon tax is actually a tax credit – because most of the pollution is caused by the excessive consumption by rich households.

There is actually a bill before the House now that has a non-zero chance of passing.

[0] https://citizensclimatelobby.org/carbon-fee-and-dividend/

I think they expect people to fly less; similar to many other “sin” taxes like those on alcohol or tobacco.

I'd argue it's a bit of both -- it's a sin tax, and a pigovian tax. Sin taxes _are_ meant to cut down on use, while pigovian taxes aren't meant to cut down on use, rather, make up for external damage (such as to the environment).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax

Sin taxes are pigovian taxes?

And if you're contending they're different I assume one is supposed to cut down use.

Ah yep, I had a typo there. Sin taxes are meant to cut down use indeed, unlike the pigovian ones.

I have a problem with that definition, pigovian taxes are obviously going to cut down use. So the choice of label seems to be a political one.

I suppose a better definition would be that sin taxes are meant to cut down on personal use, while pigovian are meant to offset external factors which the use of the product/service causes. Of course, each of these taxes are going to end up cutting down use, as it would lower demand due to a higher cost, but the idea is that a pigovian tax is successful even if the use doesn't go down significantly, as the tax proceeds would be reinvested in offsets from the negative activity. A sin tax could do this, but it doesn't always do this.

"but the idea is that a pigovian tax is successful even if the use doesn't go down significantly"

That's why I said its political. If you're pro $TAX you say its pigovian and even if it doesn't 'work' you can claim its not supposed to. Whereas if you're anti $TAX, or want to appear tough on X, you say its a sin tax.

I suppose you could argue a pigovian tax would have an upper bound, whereas a sin tax isnt bounded by anything, but for the types of things either label is used for, the externalities are so far removed and open to interpretation that you could still argue whether $TAX more than offsets/comes nowhere near offsetting X.

Long story short, I don't think you could say definitively whether a tax is sin or pigovian.

"as the tax proceeds would be reinvested in offsets from the negative activity."

Both Pigouvian & sin taxes usually go into general revenue and are rarely targeted.

What's the alternative to flying?

At least for flights around Europe, taking the train. Flight in Europe are very cheap. It's actually cheaper to fly from London to Newcastle than it is to get the train, and it takes roughly the same time.

For all flights the alternative is just not to go. Instead of flying to the Caribbean for a holiday, go some place closer and take the train, instead of flying for a business meeting, just call in. If it's worth that much for you to fly, then paying a little tax on top should be fine. Flyers still aren't paying fully for the damage they do to the environment.

As much as I worry about global warming, this antagonizing view doesn't help

"Paying for the damage" is this some kind of joke? What about all the other polluters? Shipping? Coal plants?

Macron got the Yellow Jackets by hating on people that depend on cars to do their job, because wow, if you don't live in a place with public transport and already pay a substantial amount of tax in everything else and earn less than the people in the capital you should pay more right? You're the bad guys

Wow pat yourself in the back for not taking a straw and taxing those "big bad" travelers. Then wonder why your tax revenue goes down every year or people hate you.

"Oh but sleeper trains" yeah, also known for the constant robberies and lawlessness inside them.

> because wow, if you don't live in a place with public transport and already pay a substantial amount of tax in everything else and earn less than the people in the capital you should pay more right? You're the bad guys

Damned if you do, damned if you don't, there is no nice way out of our unsustainable lifestyles, we're all going to take a blow.

> What about all the other polluters? Shipping? Coal plants?

We have 4 coal plants in france and they're about to close. As far as I know most industries pay taxes for pollution (carbon tax, eco tax, &c.)

> "Paying for the damage" is this some kind of joke? What about all the other polluters? Shipping? Coal plants?

So, until we have a unified front for addressing climate change, that doesn't exclude a single source of pollution, we should sit on our hands?

The climate doesn't care where the pollution comes from. Any reduction is a win.

> "Paying for the damage" is this some kind of joke? What about all the other polluters? Shipping? Coal plants?

Right – tax them too, and distribute the revenue back to households. That way it's not a regressive tax, but a wealth transfer from heavy polluters to regular folks who are bearing the indirect costs of the climate crisis.

This sounds like a better plan, too bad it won't happen

This tax will just go to cover deficit or to pay the exceptional privileges of the government employees including French railways which go on strike more often than not.

But surely, alienating the common people is the way to go...

I don't know about France, but this model is now reality in (at least part of) Canada, and the US has a bill before the House [0]. It's the only politically viable way of implementing carbon pricing.

[0] https://energyinnovationact.org

> This tax will just go to cover deficit or to pay the exceptional privileges of the government employees

"just", well france is the definition of a welfare state so if it "just" helps cover the deficit mostly caused by our social security system it's already quite good.

Let's not fool anyone here, europe is plagued with low cost airline companies, the vast majority of flights are for leisure. The alternative to slowly destroying the world for leisure related flights is to not travel.

I can buy TWO berlin<>mallorca round trips for the same price as a single taxi trip from berlin to the airport.

https://www.google.com/flights?hl=en#flt=/m/0156q./m/0jwz5.2...

Using another means of transport or doing without travel (eg conducting your business remotely, hiring someone local, etc )

Trains, buses, cars and not traveling.

Falling comes to mind :)

I guess that's why the tax is on take-off, so everyone can afford landing!

Bad jokes aside France has a huge highspeed rail network.

When people say they're scared of flying, I tell them they should be worried about the sudden lack of flying instead. It doesn't seem to help.

Not traveling?

Using a train.

When was the last time you took a train from Paris to New York?

When was the last time you had no choice but to fly from Paris to New York?

Not taking the flight at all can also be an option. If you really need to, well contributing 18 euros to support less polluting infrastructure such as trains is not that big a price to pay.

> When was the last time you took a train from Paris to New York?

Right after I sold my beachfront house in Arizona.

Surely for the joke to work you'd have to suggest that sea levels were much lower, not higher.

Eg: 'When I sold my Manhattan mountain lodge.'

The beachfront Arizona joke is usually not about rising sea levels but rather about earthquakes in California causing that state to break off from the continent.

It's a line from an old country song and it's a joke about the fact that AZ has no coastline.

Usually it's used to imply something is obviously false and impossible. While there is no song about a train from NYC to Paris the similarity should be obvious.

Also, see the plot from the 1978 Superman movie.

Traveling less far, or taking longer to get there, using a slower alternative.

Sailboats

Hmm… Perhaps dirigibles too?

Sounds rather wonderful to travel across the oceans in a luxury airship. Perhaps throw in the excitement of a murder mystery solved by a cunning Belgian detective with a funny moustache as well?

I took a plane from Lisbon to Paris for 35 euros last week. That feels incredibly cheap to me, especially compared to high-speed train. I routinely pay twice as much to get not even half as far by TGV. Making train more competitive by taxing planes more might not be a terrible idea. I say might because I can't pretend to even begin to understand all the implications of this tax but hopefully whoever came up with it did...

On distances like Lisbom to Paris trains can't compete on time, not only on price. There is no way a train can be made faster with the current technology (hyperloop: let's wait and see.) I think nobody goes from Lisbon to Paris and back by train to spend a weekend there.

Of course if flying costs more people will fly less.

Portugal is generally not connected by train anywhere else.

Last I checked we didn't even have more than one or 2 routes to Spain by train, due to different gauges, and spain has different gauges from france.

If you want to go from Paris to Lisbon by train expect a whole day of travel if not more, with multiple changes

Hopefully if planes become more expensive we'll see some investments in the train infrastructure. Going from Lisbon to Paris even without changes will probably still take a long time even with a bullet train but if I can schedule a trip by night and sleep reasonably comfortably I think I'd consider it over the plane.

Catching a train in the late afternoon in the center of Lisbon, working for a few hours, sleeping and waking up in the center of Paris sounds fairly pleasant to me. Of course at the moment that's effectively science fiction.

Do you agree carbon emissions (among others) contribute significantly to warming?

If not, conversation is indeed over and baseless.

If yes, what alternative do we have help reduce carbon emissions in the atmosphere? (because this is something to do, and fast now)

A pittance of a tax won't reduce carbon emissions. Depending on where it goes, it might maybe make other means of transportation a bit nicer.

To actively reduce carbon emissions, you'd have to actually make the cost of a short flight much more expensive.

Also, since not all flights can be replaced with lower emission travels (long, intercontinental flights), you'd have to tax them out to the point that people simply stop coming to Europe.

You might maybe get a half of a percentage of global CO2 emissions cut that way. Maybe. In either case, the current growth rate of emissions far eclipses that, so it is at best virtue signalling. At worst, you are punishing poor people for being too poor to afford the high rates, while at the same time bringing in less tax revenue because only a few rich people are flying.

Business class taxes are 3x-6x economy, so corporations/rich people are paying more.

Flying as is is a luxury, economy class or not, and we shouldn't forget that.

Value added taxes sure, but this is a flat head tax, I don’t think biz class is going to be charged more than economy class.

It says right there in the article that business class will be charged more than economy.

Sorry yes. The article says 18 euros is the cap for business international, not the starting point. This is still very small potatoes when a business class ticket isn’t going for less than $3k.

Interesting that they are also not taxing transits, meaning if you just transfer through CDG, you aren’t paying the tax.

And a 3 euro flat tax for economy is small potatoes too.

The original argument was that this would really hurt the poor. My counterargument was that flying is still a luxury, and the poor do not fly or fly frequently enough where this would actually be devastating to them.

If anything the tax is too small to change anyone's behavior.

They're probably trying to make sure they don't charge so much that flying out of France becomes more expensive than some nearby city in a bordering country. But even so, these taxes are very, very low. Honestly, I wouldn't mind paying 10 Euros on a flight if I knew it was helping rail systems. It's cheaper than the stupid "convenience fee" that I have to pay for concert tickets.

Convenience fees are just immoral.

I wonder if this means flying out of the French side of Geneva airport would incur the fee while the Swiss side would not?

(Edit, it seems like the French side no longer exists after Switzerland entered the Schengen).

I wonder: does Ticketmaster not make any profit at all on the ticket sale itself (does all that go to the act), and is the "convenience fee" actually their profit? Or is there profit built into the ticket price itself, and the convenience fee just additional profit?

If it's the former, it's still lousy because they're advertising lower prices than what the actual cost is.

But even so, it's still not much different from retail stores charging sales tax. Personally, I think it should be illegal to charge sales tax after-the-fact. The price advertised should be the price you pay, period. In Europe, this is exactly how it is: whatever price you see advertised is what you pay, and that's all. There's taxes (15% VAT I think, so not trivial), but they're built into the price, and they're not allowed to advertise the pre-tax price. This is exactly how it should be.

The convenience fee is backdoor extra money for the event provider (eg band), they split the money with ticket master. Ticket master plays the bad guy (everyone can hate them since they are a monopoly) so the band doesn’t look evil themselves.

Convenience fees are basically dark business method patterns.

> they’re regressive

Nothing a cheque can’t solve.

And by taxing carbon, you get the added benefit of reducing some other tax, like the regressive nature of income taxes (ie: taxing people that have to work because they didn’t inherit/afford capital assets)

A general carbon tax should absolutely be paired with a dividend of some kind to offset its effect on the poor.

However consumption patterns by everyone needs to change en masse, and a carbon tax across the board is a no-brainer to adjust individual incentives to achieve this.

>What do they expect them to do?

Use trains.

Except that trains don't have the same possible destinations, you can't (easily) take a train to a destination outside EU. I think the gov went in the wrong direction here, the tax for flights within France should have been the highest, to give more incentives for using the train

That's OK. Nobody is forcing you to take the train, you're just being expected to pay for the environmental costs of your decision to fly, should you choose to do so.

>Except that trains don't have the same possible destinations

I do not know of a commercial airport without a train station. There do however appear to be plenty of rail stations that do not have airports.

>you can't (easily) take a train to a destination outside EU.

Britain is about to test this theory. But also, that is nonsense. Passenger trains leave and enter the EU all the time.

> I do not know of a commercial airport without a train station.

I went to a business trip from AMS (Schiphol) to WRO (Wroclaw). Wroclaw airport does not have any rail station (the nearest is a kilometer away). We had to take the shuttle bus to the train station in Wroclaw city centre.

The train from AMS would probably have taken over a day. Excluding check-in and luggage drop-off, flying took less than two hours.

> I do not know of a commercial airport without a train station.

Could you contact me when I would be able to buy a Paris-Tunis train ticket, please?

There are ferries from Tunis to various spots in Italy, at which point you can likely hop on a train.

"I do not know of a commercial airport without a train station"

Leeds Bradford

One is planned to be built though.

There’s nothing inherent to carbon taxes that need to be regressive. E.g., you can provide a dividend or set of benefits from the funds that disproportionately favors the poor.

But not taxing carbon is also “regressive”, in that climate change will disproportionately hurt the world’s poorest.

> They're regressive.

Maybe not.

Firstly, it depends what is done with the proceeds. A fee and dividend system that redistributes the proceeds among all citizens can be made as progressive as you want, depending on the policy for sizing everyone's dividend.

Second,even if the dividend is an equal dollar amount for every citizen, the average person is made more than whole bythe dividend, while most wealthy individuals who have larger homes,engage in more air travel, buy new cars more frequently, etc will fund a disproportionately large fraction of the proceeds.

It's a 3€ tax on a flight, those regular people are not being "badly hurt".

Seems pretty clear to me? Flying is bad for the environment, spectacularly so. The alternative is not necessarily: flying without burning fuel. But rather: not flying.

And that isn't that big of a problem. We have many alternatives to flying, e.g. a high-speed rail system that has a 10x smaller impact. Of course you want to steer consumers towards that with incentives like these.

Earnings from these taxes don't just disappear in a black hole. They're redistributed. Perhaps to make train travel cheaper and more economically viable. Perhaps electric cars. Given the socioeconomic groups that most frequently use public transport vs air travel, this tax seems progressive, not regressive, if anything.

And that's only one alternative to flying: other forms of travel. Another is simply not travelling at all. There's a reason people don't choose to live 20 hours away from work, or choose to have a daily hobby in another country, or choose to visit friends across the world on a daily basis, because there's a cost to travel. A cost that is too high. And that's okay. Not all travel has to happen, not all travel is important enough to pay the cost.

May seem silly, but if we could teleport around the world for $1, with hypothetically insane costs to the environment, you'd have massive amounts of unnecessary travel. And the right response would be as a society that we could do without much of this unnecessary travel entirely, replace it with viable alternatives to proximity like a phonecall, a skype call, a text message, a picture etc. And we can do this by making it more expensive, and using that money to make low-impact alternatives (relatively) cheaper.

If you know that as a society we're destroying our environment and the current cost of doing so is too cheap, or the destruction is not factored in to the price, the most reasonable solution is to increase the cost.

> They're regressive, and ignore the fact that regular people are being badly hurt by them whereas the rich won't even feel it.

how many people actually need to fly outside of traveling for work? in America, a high tax on gasoline would actually be devastating to the livelihood of a lot of poor citizens. being priced out of frequent air travel doesn't sound like a massive hardship.

I am in Europe. Travel between Porto and Faro (Portugal) by train is 5 hours versus 50 minutes by plane (ok, plus one for security) and 2-5 times as expensive.

During the last 2 years I was doing this flight pretty much twice a week. It was the only way I could spend time with my kid, but still keep my job and work to support him.

I also travel for work longer distances (NY, San Francisco and all over Europe) once or twice a month (which I try to match with my trips to see my son).

Lets instead tax all the iPhone Xr and Pixel whatevers. Laptops as well. They all contribute to the shitty environment (rare materials, plastics, shipping, polluting assembling them).

This is the problem I see with pretty much every cause.

> I don't see why X or Y is needed (because I don't needed it), so everyone else is selfish and ruining the environment, but what they think is essential (new shiny gadgets, brand clothes done by kids in Asia, etc) are always forgotten.

first of all, no one is talking about banning air travel or anything like that. the tax being discussed is only 1.5 euros for non-business class flights within the EU. this doesn't actually come close to offsetting the CO2 produced by you flying from Porto to Faro one way (according to this calculator [0]).

you have a special case with your son, but most people don't need to fly outside of work. if you can already afford to fly twice a week, my guess is you can also afford another twelve euros per month to offset a fraction of the damage. if your employer really needs you to travel, I'm sure they will find a way to come up with an extra eighteen euros.

> I don't see why X or Y is needed (because I don't needed it), so everyone else is selfish and ruining the environment, but what they think is essential (new shiny gadgets, brand clothes done by kids in Asia, etc) are always forgotten.

I do agree with you here. what we need is a fair taxation scheme to offset all environmental damage. just make a list: how much does it cost to undo the damage of one flight, one ipad, etc. then you let people buy what they want, but make them pay to fix the environmental damage. when the price reflects the true cost, people will figure out what they actually need and budget accordingly. there will be some things (cars in rural areas are an obvious example) where it will simply be too damaging to the poor to fully tax immediately, but most people will find that there's a lot of stuff they can reduce their consumption of.

[0] https://co2.myclimate.org/en/flight_calculators/new

I'm ok with taxing flights if we also tax pretty much everything else for the environmental externalities of it. My problem is when countries/politicians/ordinary people choose one or two items that don't fully affect them and try to lecture others about it. (not saying it is your case, just in general).

And for my case, it is about 4 flights a week (both ways * 2). It may not be much, but is an extra 25 euros per month. Will this make me stop flying? Not really, but I will be pretty sour about it so I don't see how it offsets anything (but to be fair, us Europeans are already used to be heavily taxed in pretty much everything, and while I won't really feel the cost of the 25 euros, others will, see yellow jackets and the gas tax). And I pay for my work flights since I work for myself ;)

For you to get an idea, I just checked flights for September and I can do a return flight for 36.97 euros and will take me 50 minutes (+ airport time, which is about 1 hour for me). Same trip by train is 5h50 and costs 64 euros (on promotion, regular price is 105 euros.

ps: I hate flying and travelling. I do it because I need to.

> Will this make me stop flying? Not really, but I will be pretty sour about it so I don't see how it offsets anything

Someone else who flies just as much as you and could make an effort not to will also feel sour about it and maybe make an effort to change the situation. Maybe that person can save up and buy a home someplace else, or wake up earlier to take the train to wherever that person is going.

The problem is we are not talking about choosing between a car and public transportation where the time difference will be an extra 10 or so minutes. We are talking time differences between 1 hour and 5 hours, or between 4 hours and days. No one will really stop flying unless you tax it 200 euros per flight or something.

I just see this as the French government adding an extra tax to deal with their own budget issues. (which is ok, but lets call it that, and not an offset or 'incentive' tax, like it will actually change anything for the environment)

> Travel between Porto and Faro (Portugal) by train is 5 hours versus 50 minutes by plane

That's exactly the problem: Porto to Faro for should have a better train connectivity, that will emit 10x less CO2, should take not more than 3 hours and should be much cheaper than taking a plane.

Why can't we have good things?

Carbon taxes are not inherently regressive, that's simply false. What do you DO with the taxes, that's what makes them progressive or regressive. If you rebate the taxes to the people, they become PROgressive, as the rich are much more likely to have higher carbon footprints.

>> There's no alternative to burning fuel by energy density on an airline

This initiative makes trains more competitive. Trains are greener and often quicker especially for intra-european continental routes.

Greener ok, but quicker?

Even if you account for the security issues, I never had a plane in Europe being quicker than the plane (with all the overhead). In most cases is double or triple the time (for shorter distances) or close to impossible for longer ones.

Flight:

1) You have to appear at least 1.5 hour before departure (luggage drop, security checks)

2) You have to drive to an airport and back, might take hours in some cases unless you live close enough (in a big city), but it will usually take not less than 30-50 mins one way

3) It takes up to 30 minutes to get luggage after landing

Rail:

a) Train stations are in the centers of cities; max 10-15 mins by subway or bus/tram; high-speed trains also stop in many mid-size cities/towns

b) You can appear just at departure time

Then why not take revenue from this tax and put it into train subsidies? I don't see that happening.

You can have a kickback, like Canada. Basically, you pay the carbon tax as a middle class person and then you get a decent amount of money back from the government to cover the damages, and everyone gets up to the same amount (which is like a thousand bucks or something). So, it becomes no biggy for a middle class family who took one flight during the past three years, but a celebrity who flies around with his private jet multiple times a week will feel the pinch.

> There's no alternative to burning fuel by energy density on an airline, so why go after flights?

It is still very early but there are projects working on electric flight.

I don't believe there is technology even on the horizon which would make this remotely feasible. The best of electric aircraft at the moment can fly for 90 minutes carrying two people; allegedly aimed at the flight training market. Except that gives it about enough endurance for a single lesson and it'd then need to be recharged for 3-4 hours before it could fly again. Compare this to a Rotax powered trainer which burns ~15 litres of fuel an hour and can be refuelled in 5 minutes.

You are correct. There are people working on this, but the best estimates I've seen are that hybrid-electric airliners are ~30-40 years from commercialization and fully electric simply isn't feasible without a fundamental breakthrough in the battery energy-density space.

Even hybrids only make sense to me in the context of aircraft having the ability to taxi using electric motors, only starting their engines at the holding point (turbine engines burn a significant amount of fuel even at idle). I believe Airbus have a patent on this idea.

Otherwise turbine engines are run close to their designed maximum continuous thrust for the majority of a flight. It's not like a car where they only need ~20% of their maximum power in cruise.

I'm not an aerospace engineer, so I can only repeat what I've seen in presentations. (I'm a software engineer at an aerospace research organization.)

One specific area that I recall being investigated is the ability to decouple power and thrust. That is, convert some of the power generated by the existing turbines into electricity and use that to drive an electric fan in (a) non-traditional location(s). This can have complex aerodynamic interactions that I don't really understand in detail, but the take-away is that it can reduce drag and thus overall energy required for a given flight.

The purpose of this tax is to get some revenue while making it look like they care about global warming.

Why is it regressive?

You don't need to fly in western Europe, and anyway the charge increases for more expensive classes.

I'm not even sure that carbon taxes overall are regressive. Can't afford a car? Your transport is lower carbon. Drive a small car because you cant afford a large one? Your transport is lower carbon. Cant afford air con, cant afford heating, a new phone every year...

Yes there are edge cases, not being able to afford insulation, an energy efficient fridge or car or whatever but I would guess your average poor person has a lower carbon footprint than your average rich person.