But that ignores the significant number of short-haul flights in our system that connect, say, New York and Washington, D.C., Chicago and Minneapolis, or Austin and Houston, or San Francisco and Sacramento. Americans who are heading to the other side of the country to spend our brief Christmas holiday with family or friends are pretty much condemned to flying. Of course, the United States is a far larger country than France. For example, a passenger arriving at Paris’s Orly Airport who is going on from there to Nantes, Lyons, or Bordeaux can get there by train in less than two-and-a-half hours, so why take a plane? Urged by a citizen’s group founded by the Macron government, the French asked the EU for permission to cancel competing flights on these routes - in order to encourage passengers to spend less money, risk fewer cancellations or delays, and to contribute four times less global pollution than if they took a plane covering the same route. Think of France: In recent days, the French government received permission from the European Union to cancel short-haul flights where there is a train available on equivalent routes. For example, according to the French consumer group Quechoisir, on short-haul flights, planes emit 77 times more greenhouse gasses per passenger than trains that cover the same distance.Īs climate change produces more and more travel crises and airlines leave more and more passengers stranded, why has it occurred to no government agency to encourage passengers to use the train, which is cheaper, more convenient, and less subject to cancellations?
Through their prodigious use of fossil fuels, the airlines are disproportionately responsible for polluting the environment. It isn’t only that climate change is responsible for airline failures like the one we have just experienced. But why has no official at any level of government noted that it is climate change that has made such airline failures almost predictable? We warn of climate change in the very abstract and the very particular, but when it comes to the responsibility of a powerful industry, we tend to focus on the failures of particular companies, like Southwest. “The Department will use the fullest extent of its investigative and enforcement powers to hold Southwest accountable,” he warned, “if it fails to adhere to the promises made to reimburse passengers for costs incurred for alternate transportation.” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg lost no time making clear that Southwest would be held responsible for commitments it had made following Hurricane Ian last September to protect stranded passengers. Delta, American, and United had recovered fairly quickly from the cancellations and delays of the previous week, but over Christmas, as many as 80 percent of Southwest’s flights failed to take off. 29th, would be a good day for people trying to fly: The total number of delays was expected to be 14,606, and the total number of cancellations only 1,599. After a tumultuous week when hundreds of thousands of travelers were blocked from reaching their destinations by flight delays, cancellations, and reroutings, the website reported that Friday, Dec.
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