France has received the green light from the European Commission to start cracking down on ultra-polluting short-haul flights within the country, starting with a ban on three popular flights from Paris-Orly Airport. The country also aims to curb the use of private jets in an effort to both reduce CO2 emissions and keep up the social media backlash against the super-rich jet set in a time of soaring inflation and energy cutbacks.

The measure to ban short-haul commercial flights within France, first proposed in 2021, needed the nod of approval from the EC after considerable pushback from the Union of French Airports and the European branch of the Airports Council International. While the original plan hoped to ban eight flights, the EC only approved three flight routes that offer good alternatives to travel by rail in less than 2.5. hours, with many options for direct train travel throughout the day. That includes journeys between Paris-Orly and Bordeaux, Nantes, and Lyon.

Three more routes may potentially be added to the list – between Paris Charles de Gaulle and Lyon and Rennes, and between Lyon and Marseille — but these weren’t approved because travelers needing to get to airports in Paris and Lyon don’t, at the moment anyway, have options to take very early or very late trains. Two other proposed routes, from Paris Charles de Gaulle to Bordeaux and Nantes, were excluded from the plan because traveling by train takes slightly more…