Norway Green Party Proposes Personal Flight Quotas

By: Ben Schlappig

Updated: June 1, 2021
Published: April 21, 2021

44 comments

The Green Party of Norway (MDG) has revealed a series of initiatives targeting the aviation industry. This comes ahead of September’s national elections — while there won’t be a Green Party Prime Minister, the party could play an important role in building a coalition.

So, what aviation measures is the Green Party proposing?

In this post:

Creating personal flight quotas

The Green Party is proposing the concept of flight quotas for every Norwegian:

Everyone would be given a quota for how many flights they can take each year
This would be a barter system of sorts, so that those who fly a lot could buy their flight quota from others who don’t fly as much
A person’s flight quota will take into account geographical and socioeconomic differences
It’s argued that Norway can’t just wait for electric planes, but rather that something needs to be done to reduce peoples’ appetite for flying and travel

Eliminating airport duty free shopping

The Green Party wants to eliminate duty free shopping at airports. This is obviously a huge source of revenue for airports, so why discontinue it? Well, it’s argued that duty free shopping creates an incentive to take more flights, and that’s bad.

Improving rail connections

French lawmakers recently moved to ban short haul domestic flights, though in reality this only eliminated five out of 100+ domestic routes. Along similar lines, the Green Party wants Norway to invest in train travel so that it can become more efficient, and a better alternative to flying.

The problem is that Norway is a fairly large and sparsely populated country with mountainous terrain, so creating high-speed rail links is expensive and challenging.

Banning advertising of domestic routes

The Green Party also wants to ban advertising of domestic routes, with a similar goal of trying to create as little desire as possible to fly.

Bottom line

Norway’s Green Party is proposing some pretty drastic measures to reduce demand for flying, from creating personal flight quotas, to eliminating duty free purchases. It’s anyone’s guess if any of this will ever become law, though these sure are some major proposals.

What’s my take?

Investing in rail is of course great, if it could become a practical alternative to flying
The concept of banning advertising for domestic flights will just cause advertising for international flights to increase, so does that really accomplish anything?
Banning duty free sales seems a bit much, because it’s not like people fly because of duty free
I’m not sure a system that commoditizes peoples’ right to travel would have a positive impact; it also seems unfair that there would be no limits on driving, but there would be limits on flying

What do you make of Norway’s proposals to reduce flying?

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schar Guest

April 22, 2021, 11:34 pm

absolutely LUDICROUS. attention needs to be turned to countries that emit air pollution like crazy like India, China, etc. Hold those countries accountable, force them to change and become more green with their factories etc instead of restricting personal freedoms in basic necessities like freedom of travel.

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cargocult Guest

April 22, 2021, 11:29 am

@Richard You are begging the question that air travel is a social problem. Demonstrate exactly how it is problematic first and then we can move on to mitigating it. Even if carbon output were such a dire problem, there are much larger emitters than air travel we could address. If you believe carbon output is killing people, there are other things that I assume kill people in far greater numbers such as drugs/alcohol/tobacco/obesity. Why are the latter three not banned? Why would you not address problems like those? Why not cap-and-trade food consumption? Do we know what the area under the demand curve for calories should be for a national population? People shouldn't be allowed to eat more than that, and certainly not any of it as animal products.

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NoNo Guest

April 21, 2021, 5:30 pm

Just another tax/exchange. The only people making money on this will be the ones instituting the laws. Kind of like our carbon exchange here. Eye roll.

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Henry Guest

April 21, 2021, 5:20 pm

I would truly be surprised if this actually happened. - airport duty free hasn't been a deal for a very, very long time ... certainly not one worth the inconvenience of paying for and flying a flight. - people will figure out a way to easily trade their own flight credits, for cash, to people who want them. i don't think this is a bad thing; if the individual flight credits are issued fairly then this could be a sensible way to proceed. but, please, go ahead and make the rail networks better. making the train network competitive is good for everyone.

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view Guest

April 21, 2021, 4:14 pm

Interesting observations and kind of amusing to read about my home country here. While it is clear for all that the Green party is an extreme left party and are outright hated across much of Norway especially rural areas, they do have a following amonger younger people particularly in the bigger cities. While I agree to an extent that we need to invest in new and modern future industries (oil is declining and going away at some point) I find it hilarious that it is so easy to forget where we come from and forget where the majority of our revenues and taxes are coming from today: offshore oil and gas. The Green party wants to end all oil exploration today, if we did the country would be technically bankrupt. Like in all election years, some of the most provoking ideas will be floated but this is not going to fly (pun intended).

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