Posted on 12/05/2018 6:31:10 AM PST by reaganaut1
‘There is no Plan B because there is no Planet B,” Emmanuel Macron lectured Donald Trump—in English—when the American President withdrew from the Paris climate agreement last year. Well, apparently there is a Plan B after all. Mr. Macron on Tuesday stopped his fuel-tax increase after concluding that marginal carbon reductions aren’t worth kneecapping an economy and sacrificing his political career. Mr. Trump could have warned him.
The French President views stopping climate change as a grand legacy project, and he had hoped to use higher fuel taxes to discourage driving for the sake of slashing carbon emissions. It didn’t matter to him that French emissions already are very low on a per capita basis and further cuts to transport emissions would be extremely difficult to achieve. But this matters a great deal to lower-income rural voters whose use of cars for daily life and business was about to become much more expensive.
Those voters produced the yellow-vest movement—named for the safety gear they wear—that in turn has created a political crisis for Mr. Macron. What began as a few hundred thousand protesters scattered around the country became more than a million last weekend, including inexcusable rioting mobs in Paris.
Mr. Macron’s tax backtrack, which his government says is only for six months, might induce the protesters to return home. But the movement grew so large and garnered so much public sympathy that his entire economic-reform agenda is now in jeopardy. The fuel tax was not part of his election campaign.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
The French aristocracy is alive and well.
How dare the serfs think they should be allowed freedom of movement!
If you want to save the Planet than GoFundMe
The socialists succeed only in the equal distribution of misery.
I remember 18 months ago, when elected, the globalist, leftist, corporatist, deep-state media all hailed Macron as a “new generation,” “France’s Savior,” or “France’s Obama.”
The latter is definitely true - like Obama, Macron is a deep-state puppet and ideologue, who will push their destructive plans.
An article in The Spectator said that Macron has an almost autistic inability to connect with regular French people. Sounds about right.
Socialism is slavery without the perks.
As always, he and the rest of the Gaia worshiping global.socialists won’t learn a damned thing. They’ll just keep trying to push this and keep failing while costing the taxpayers vast.amounts of money.
Its not about saving the earth. Its about POWER...THEIR POWER.
Zee Frenchmon he no understand zee powair of zee free markets! zut and merde!
Say what you will about the surrender monkeys, when our taxes are raised, and they will be, you can bet that it will produce no more than a blip on the radar and a whimpering acquiescence by the U.S. electorate.
Macron does what he’s told.
Beginning with the fraud Algore, any Carbon Tax isn’t about the carbon, it’s about the TAX.
France doesn't need to do any more virtue-signaling in the AGW scam.
It has paid in full.
Macron is a dumbass.
Oui, je le dit “Phuque ewe monsieur”.
About six months prior to the French election, I was watching an interview with a historian-professor who had studied every election since WW II in France. So he came to the topic of Macron, and noted....this was the oddest character to ever emerge...with no prior election experience. Most past candidates had been mayors or major figures in government. Macron had none of the squares filled that you’d typically expect.
The wife-story? The professor suggested that this intrigued French people...like a soap-opera setting. The guy looked like a male-model, and that was the real sales gimmick being used. Adding to it...the top candidates from the center-left and center-right parties? Scandals...they were easily finished off.
Exactly right. NONE of these elites care one whit about “saving the earth.” It is all about their POWER.
The last sentence of the WSJ article reads “The point is that the public seems to understand better than progressive elites that the consequences of climate change, whatever they turn out to be, will be easier to confront the more prosperous the world is.”
What the author wrote is true enough (the common man has more common sense than the elites), but completely ignores the power lust.
Whenever someone wondered if his very odd marriage said something important about Macron’s character they were shouted down.
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