Here’s something on my EuroSavant Twitter timeline that made me sit up and take notice: “Low-Cost Air Tickets are A Catastrophe, From Which Only Legislation Can Save Us”

To be sure, this comes from the Copenhagen-based Dagbladet Information, generally considered to be oriented to the Left (and that in Danish terms!). And the guest-columnist for this particular piece is one Lauritz Korfix Schultz (@lauritzschultz), a high-school teacher.

But since when has one’s station in life necessarily blocked anyone from putting together a cogent argument, an alarming and convincing warning? This comes in particular after a “scorching” European summer (and elsewhere within the Northern Hemisphere) with drought everywhere and the widespread outbreak of forest-fires.

Schultz focuses squarely on commercial aircraft flights and the substantial contribution they make to ever-more CO2 in the atmosphere, to a greater greenhouse effect that is gradually heating the Earth. Yes, there is a growing realization here, with increasing coverage (at least within Scandinavian papers) of those who resolve never again to fly, out of concern for future generations. Admirable, for sure, Schultz says, but hardly enough: it is rather time for national governments to intervene to at least make flying far more expensive, in order precisely to drive down demand and ensure that ticket prices finally accurately reflect the damage they enable travelers to inflict on our common environment.

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For well over a decade now, in the European air travel market the “legacy” airlines that everyone was used to from the past have been struggling to compete with low-cost carriers who have been able to offer substantially lower prices in return for a substantially lower level of service. The latter service has nonetheless consistently remained tolerable enough for cost-conscious travelers to keep purchasing tickets in droves (although recent developments suggest that things might be starting to go a bit too far).

Now an interesting article in the German news-magazine Focus (Advantageous – but not cheap) tells of a new plan for fighting back from the German flag carrier (although it is no longer publicly-owned) Lufthansa. In the main, this scheme calls for combining 133 of Lufthansa’s European flights with 150 flights from its Germanwing subsidiary into a new airline, provisionally called (within internal Lufthansa documents) “Direct4you.”

One truly hopes that they can come up with a better name than that prior to the planned launch next January. (Or perhaps just decide to go whole-hog with the text-speak and call it “Direct4U.”) Otherwise, the airline has been busy re-training its personnel in the whole low-cost template, something by now familiar to all within the industry: things like equipment standardization, more efficient jet turn-around, a simplified (and no longer free) on-board food & drink menu – and employees who are paid less, when they are not themselves lower-paid outsourced workers. One might also want to ask what happened with Germanwings itself, since that was supposed to be the low-cost airline that would save Lufthansa, back when it bought Germanwings at the beginning of 2009. Well, apparently that alone did not work, because the mother company is still in trouble, steadily recording financial losses, so that it has to try again, this time introducing cost-cutting techniques and procedures more thoroughly.

The problem is that this sort of thing does truly involve destroying much of the legacy of how the company has done business in the past, in order to try and save its future. This includes those past wage agreements, and in Germany overturning those is sure to be a tall order. Already the spokesman for the cabin personnel’s union is warning that this cannot work. We will be able to see shortly whether he is right.