It’s a debate that everyone knows by now – on business trips or before going on vacation: does it have to be a plane, or couldn’t you also take the more climate-friendly train? On the popular Berlin-Frankfurt route, for example, a flight passenger is responsible for 127 kilograms of greenhouse gases, while rail passengers only cause just under eleven kilograms.
In view of these differences, the Green candidate Annalena Baerbock brought up the ban on short journeys during the election campaign. But this demand soon disappeared from the Greens election campaign. Because anyone who travels a lot knows: the train is sometimes a good alternative – but often not one either, not yet. The environmental protection organization Greenpeace had this calculated in detail: for the 150 most important routes within the EU that can be reached in one to two hours by plane, but which could also be reached by train. The result: sometimes rail travel works well, but in a number of cases a general ban on short journeys would make travel almost impossible.
A third of these connections can be made by train in less than six hours – this is the acceptable and competitive travel time for Greenpeace, e.g. Amsterdam-Paris (3:23 h), Paris-Frankfurt (3:50 h) or Venice-Naples (5 : 10 h). Flights should be banned on all of these routes, the organization demands. Especially on 21 of the 150 most important travel connections where the train takes less than four hours, such as Madrid-Barcelona (2:30 h). The survey shows that on 23 routes, the traveler would be on the road for more than 16 hours.
Land-based travel is made more difficult by increasingly poor international train connections, criticizes Greenpeace after reviewing all timetables. Of the Eurostar for example, has significantly reduced its tunnel trains between Great Britain and France. Only buses now run between Sweden and Norway. And on the Frankfurt-Lyon route, an important connecting axis between Germany and France, there is only one direct train per day – which is an example of how passengers who change from plane to train have to reckon with cumbersome transfers. At least the night train connections are becoming more attractive again: Vienna-Paris and Zurich-Amsterdam start in December.
Lufthansa has canceled at least the Nuremberg-Munich route
Incidentally, according to Greenpeace, Germany bears the “greatest responsibility” for air traffic in Europe: a third of the 150 most frequently used EU routes end or start in this country. And for many, the travel time when using the train is less than six hours – in the Frankfurt-Berlin example it is 3 hours and 54 minutes. And from city center to city center, without checking in, without waiting at the gate and without using the S-Bahn, as they emphasize at the environmental protection association. This in turn coincides with the attitude of the Federal Ministry of Transport, previously headed by Andreas Scheuer (CSU): There they do not want to ban domestic flights, but they want to reduce them through better connections and financial incentives. In fact, from next year the investment funds in the railways will for the first time be higher than those in the road (9.3 billion euros compared to 8.3 billion euros), and the sales tax for long-distance train tickets has also been reduced to seven percent, the air traffic tax on the other hand raised a little.
Incidentally, Lufthansa has already reacted in one case: The Munich-Nuremberg connection within Bavaria was canceled this summer – but the alternative clearly shows the difficulty: an express bus now runs between the two airports because there are still no express trains stopping at Munich Airport, which the Airline constantly criticized. After all, this alternative is also comparatively environmentally friendly: an airplane in domestic operation emits 214 grams of climate-damaging greenhouse gases per passenger kilometer. A car still weighs 154 grams – a long-distance train or long-distance bus, on the other hand, only 29 grams.
Despite these differences and the ongoing debates, flying is less responsible for climate change than some might assume. Global air traffic contributes 3.5 percent to global warming through CO₂, contrails or soot, insofar as it is caused by humans, this was shown a year ago by a large international study involving the German Aerospace Center. Generating electricity and heat from coal, gas and oil and burning gasoline and diesel while driving are far more serious factors.