With short-haul domestic flights increasingly coming under the spotlight as a climate-damaging extravagance, Germany’s CDU party has indicated it could be in favour of a ban. 

Germany’s CDU party will not rule out domestic flight ban

Federal Research Minister Anja Karliczek has said she will not rule out a ban on domestic flights between different German airports in order to achieve the country’s climate protection goals. 

Speaking to the DPA ahead of the publication of a new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), she said Germany needed to quicken its approach to tackling climate change. She added that she expects the report to dispel any remaining doubts that humans have been the main cause of climate change since the beginning of industrialisation. 

“If we say that we no longer want domestic German air traffic, then we will have to organise public transport more efficiently and build high-speed routes, for example,” Karliczek said. “We have to consistently follow this path. But that can’t take 30 years. That is a decision that we will have to fix in the next coalition agreement.” 

Europe debates impact of short-haul plane journeys

The proposal certainly isn't a new one. The possibility of banning short-haul flights has been hotly debated within the European Union in recent years, and was given fresh impetus in 2019 when European Commission candidate Frans Timmermans proposed banning all short-haul flights within the EU. 

In response, in mid-October 2019, Germany opted to almost double taxes on short-haul passenger flights, while reducing the price of train tickets by 10 percent. Most political parties in Germany now also support the idea of moving all remaining governmental institutions in Bonn (the former capital of West Germany) to Berlin, because ministers fly between the two German cities approximately 230.000 times per year. 

Other European countries have also embraced the idea: In June 2019 France decided to prohibit airline connections covering routes that could be travelled in 2,5 hours or less by train. In March of the same year the Dutch government voted to ban flights between Amsterdam Airport Schiphol and Brussels Airport, a distance of about 150 kilometres, but the ban was later overturned as it was considered to contravene the European Commission’s free market regulations.