Posted on 12/04/2018 2:23:24 AM PST by reaganaut1
France’s violent Yellow Vest protests are now about many domestic concerns, but it’s no accident that the trigger was a fuel-tax hike. Nothing reveals the disconnect between ordinary voters and an aloof political class more than carbon taxation.
The fault line runs between anti-carbon policies and economic growth, and France is a test for the political future of emissions restrictions. France already is a relatively low-carbon economy, with per-capita emissions half Germany’s as of 2014. French governments have nonetheless pursued an “ecological transition” to further squeeze carbon emissions from every corner of the French economy. The results are visible in the Paris streets.
President Emmanuel Macron and his Socialist predecessor François Hollande targeted auto emissions because they account for about 40% of France’s carbon emissions from fuel combustion compared to 21% in Germany. But this is mainly because France relies heavily on nuclear power for electricity. Power generation and heating account for only 13% of French emissions, compared to 44% across the Rhine. French road-transport emissions were a mere 0.4% of global carbon emissions in 2016, when overall French emissions were less than 1%.
Yet Paris insists on cutting more, though transport emissions are notoriously hard to reduce. Cleaner engines or affordable hybrids have been slow to emerge. Undeterred, Mr. Macron pushed ahead with a series of punitive tax hikes to discourage driving.
The protesters in Paris will be expected to pay much of the up to €8 billion annual tab for a minuscule global benefit—that’s how much tax revenue Mr. Macron thinks his levies will raise. This is preposterous in an economy that still has an 8.9% jobless rate (21.5% for the young) and will struggle to hit 2% annual GDP growth. Yellow Vests from less prosperous rural areas, who depend on cars for daily life, know it.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
... and who will be our next Trump? I fear he is a one-off.
Sounds like the leftist frogs need to get busy developing nuclear-powered cars.
Carbon??
Naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah..............I don’t think so.
Does “Carbon” have anything to do with closing FOURTEEN nuclear power plants?? Really?
To the aloof $7.00/gal gas is just a number on a piece of paper and not a real problem.
Mimics the US exactly. It's the metropolitan folks who are the liberals in this country.
So where do the globalist hacks at WSJ call the whole “climate change” thing a hoax? I don’t see that.
Trump should hold a MFGA rally in France.
The French people (or at least some of them) are smart enough that they figured out all this B.S. isn’t really about “climate change”. If it was, they wouldn’t also be trying to shut down nuclear plants, they would be building MORE nuclear plants!
This was another attempt at ushering in the George Soros - led agenda to implement modern feudalism on a global scale and turn the middle class into peasants who totally depend on the ruling overlords.
Macron could help by stopping his breathing out.
The Dutch think-tanker Bjørn Lomborg and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, is a strong advocate for focusing attention and resources on what he perceives as far more pressing world problems than climate change, such as AIDS, malaria, malnutrition and clean water.
He argues that many of the costly measures and actions adopted by scientists and policy makers to meet the challenges of global warming will ultimately have minimal impact on the world's rising temperature.
IOW, spending a dollar on climate change solutions, such as carbon taxes, to save a nickel in outcome, is not sound economic or scientific advice.
Spending all of our resources trying to stop climate change, which has the least bang for the buck in outcome versus solving world hunger or ensuring everyone has clean water to drink, doesn't make sense.
We can solve many of those problems now and they will have a greater impact on populations than the dire warnings on the climate changing in a hundred years will have.
Spending all of our money on something people can't see concrete results from now, is a non-starter for the majority of the population.
That's about how it is in this country, too.
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