Air France will this week announce plans to purchase between 50 and 70 Canadian-made Airbus A220 medium-haul jetliners, part of a keenly-awaited revamp of its fleet, France's Journal du Dimanche newspaper reported Sunday.

Air France's board is expected to confirm the huge order on Tuesday, a day before the carrier publishes its results for the first half of 2019.

If it’s true, it’s weird. And not a good weird.

Air France is not short of medium-haul planes. There’s no massive hole in their network because they’ve run out of planes.

They would mostly be buying new planes to replace old ones.

This would be good news for Air France because then they could:

• sell the old planes on ebay. Sorry, I meant globalplanesearch.com. Yes, there are websites for buying old Boeings! That is kind of cool.

• show off their new low CO2 emissions “per passenger”, which would be so low the climate emergency would effectively be over, just like that!

• compete better with low-cost airlines, should these continue to be allowed to sell ridiculously low-priced tickets (which is doubtful).

It would however be bad news for almost every other reason I can possibly think of as a sentient being on planet Earth. Here are a few such reasons:

• because of the huge CO2 emissions from simply building the new planes.

• because the old Air France planes aren’t leaving the planet—they’ll just go to countries that need planes and don’t have a lot of cash lying around. So the higher “per passenger” emissions won’t actually disappear, they’ll still be there even if you can’t see them anymore because Air France’s annual environmental report is glued over your face. The emissions will just get moved somewhere else. On the same planet.

• because if Air France competes better with low-cost airlines, it will carry more passengers, make more money, and buy more planes. There is nothing blocking their total CO2 emissions from increasing even as the “CO2 emissions per passenger” decrease.

• because! Just because! dammit!

The news would of course not be bad for anyone with a financial link to Airbus: designers, engineers, plane construction teams, etc. For that bunch of Canadians, it’s very good news. I get that. Those lucky so-and-so’s might even end up with enough spare dough to buy an AC unit for home, which would totally help them stay cool during Canada’s next heatwave.

Taking a step back from looking at the winners (a few Canadians/Airbus) and losers (all other humans on the disintegrating planet) for a moment though, perhaps the most depressing thing in all of this is seeing Air France bet that their medium-haul European business is here to stay.

What’s in their predictions for the future that we don’t know about?