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France has moved forward with an eye-catching partial ban on
domestic flights, hoping to defy critics and protesters to reach
its EU-led Paris Agreement pledge of 40% GHG cuts by 2030.
The lower chamber of the French parliament, the National
Assembly, signed off on the ban within the transportation portion
of a bill approved on 10 April. It will formally vote on the entire
bill on 4 May, it said.
Nicknamed the Climate and Resilience Bill and
partially the creation of a citizen's assembly, its wide-ranging
measures envision cutting the emissions of sectors such as
aviation, road transport, buildings, construction, and food.
Notably, it will introduce several bans. These will target some
short-haul flights within France, polystyrene (styrofoam) food
containers, sales of certain high-emissions vehicles, and fossil
fuel advertising.
Beyond the bans, it obliges climate-friendly public procurement,
vegetarian options for government-supplied meals, eco-labels for
food, a scoring system for consumer products, higher energy
efficiency for buildings, regional renewable energy goals, limits
on construction, and added solar panel installations while
tightening laws around mining and electronic waste.
It also creates a 10-year prison penalty for those who cause
serious pollution incidents, called "ecocide offenses."
But the French government's environmental advisers have said the
bill still fails to fully reach France's 2030 emissions
obligations. Critics include the arms-length environmental body the
National Council for Ecological Transition, the consultative body
the Economic, Social and Environmental Council, and the new
independent state advisory, the High Council for Climate (HCC).
The HCC advised lawmakers to strengthen the bill by expanding
its scope and imposing new measures more quickly to catch up with
the EU. "This is all the more necessary as the raising of the
European objective of reducing emissions from -40% to 55% in 2030
compared with 1990 could imply an increase in French efforts," said
the HCC.
The French trucking industry strongly denounced the bill's tax
on commercial diesel, noting it would "not [be] effective" in
reducing GHGs or motivate fleet conversion. It was skeptical about
the availability of so-called "clean" truck engines. "When will
they really be available for mass rollout? When will appropriate
supply networks be available to distribute energy?" said the
National Federation of Road Transport in a 12 April statement.
The latest measures on diesel provide a sense of déjà vu after
France's ill-fated ecotax on diesel impacted civilians, who brought
Paris to a standstill three years ago. The 2018 "Yellow Vest"
protests in the capital city and elsewhere led to President
Emmanuel Macron's withdrawal of the tax.
The following year, Macron randomly selected a 150-member
citizen's assembly to make climate policy proposals, and their
advice was rewritten by lawmakers to form the Climate and
Resilience Bill.
The government will not target civilians with a fuel tax this
time around. Learning its lesson, it will gradually increase the
diesel tax for businesses like trucking companies to encourage
technology switching, while gradually eliminating tax advantages
for diesel.
But the government is still targeting transportation sector
emissions. "Transport is the main source of greenhouse gas
emissions in our country," Minister for the Ecological Transition
Barbara Pompili said in a 12 April statement.
The government plans to limit civilian vehicle emissions in
other ways. The bill would create reserved lanes for carpooling
around large cities, develop park-and-ride facilities, and add more
urban low-emissions zones by 2024. It would impose a ban on the
most polluting cars in 45 large cities by 2025 and a 2030 ban on
the sale of cars emitting more than 95 grams per km of CO2, while
also subsidizing electric bikes.
One of the measures proposed by the citizens was the ban on
direct domestic flights, for example from Paris to Nantes, when a
journey of under 2.5 hours on "much less polluting" trains is
available. This part of the bill would let France "become one of
the first countries in the world to prioritize trains over air
travel wherever possible," according to a French Environmental
Ministry's statement on the bill.
The bill also requires airlines to account for their domestic
flights between major cities by buying carbon offsets, for example
forestry projects in France or elsewhere by 2024. Airlines may
voluntarily offset their international flights as well.
But the measures are not going far enough on emissions,
Greenpeace France said on 9 April. The government pledged to ban
the construction of new airports and extensions, but this will
likely not stop a planned extension at Paris' Charles de Gaulle
Airport at Terminal 4, it said.
The law is also not consistent with the Paris Agreement because
it will not force airlines to reduce their overall annual
emissions, it said.
While France's latest bill may have limited aviation targets, it
does give France a mandate to join in on talks to spur an EU move
to extend carbon pricing to more aviation emissions in June.
Airlines in Europe have been obliged to pay a carbon price for
some of their emissions under the EU's Emissions Trading System
(ETS) from 2013 to 2020. However, their emissions continued to grow
as 82% of airlines benefitted from carbon price exemptions known as
free allowances.
The carbon pricing regime also only covered intra-EU flights,
awaiting a review of a controversial global offsetting scheme known
as Corsia first proposed by the International Civil Aviation
Organization in 2016. That review is set to conclude in 2024, but
international flights might be included in the ETS following a
review of the system later this year, according
to the European Commission.
It will further tackle airline emissions, by proposing its
ReFuelEU regulation to boost the supply of sustainable aviation
fuels (SAF), which currently represent only 0.05% of total jet fuel
consumption.
Europe's refiners have a foot in the door ahead of such rules.
Shell recently teamed up with LanzaTech, a US-based company that
creates fuel from the carbon byproduct ofcarbon capture and
storage, to grow the market for lower-emission aviation fuels.
Likewise, France's Total plans to start selling
cooking-oil-based SAF from its La Mède biorefinery and its Oudalle
facility to French airports this year. The news came despite
continued low demand for jet fuel, according to IHS Markit analysis of French sustainable
jet fuel markets. The venture may rival the partnership of
Finland's Neste and the aviation division of BP, which in 2019
supplied biofuel-based SAF in France.
Posted 15 April 2021 by Cristina Brooks, Senior Journalist, Climate and Sustainability
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