Quote of the Day:

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.

–Wall Street Journal editorial on the cause of the Paris riots

 

If you read the New York Time's piece today on the violent Yellow Vest riots in Paris, you won't find a word about the global carbon tax that triggered the riots.

Yes, the Times admits that a fuel tax is the immediate trigger, but it never mentions the global carbon tax that led to the fuel tax hike and is the cause of the riots.

Hmmm. It's almost as if the paper of record just doesn't want to know how much the global carbon tax, so beloved of the green movement, harms ordinary citizens.

Fortunately, an editorial in the Wall Street Journal lays it out clearly:

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.

French President Emmanuel Macron followed his Socialist predecessor Francois Hollande in the policy of imposing environmental rules that do three things: please green piety, squeeze middle and working class people, and have a minuscule at best effect on world climate. It sort of makes people mad:

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.

They’re insulted when Mr. Macron tells them to wait for better public transport or to carpool—yes, he really said that. They also assume that Paris will waste a fuel-tax windfall on boondoggles such as unreliable renewable power to replace zero-emissions nuclear plants.

The Journal says that the carbon tax revolt may be coming to a city near you.

Already Washington state voters recently rejected a carbon tax that green activists wanted ardently, while in Canada Ontario is suing to stave off federal carbon tax.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel also supported a transition to renewable fuels that caused energy prices to skyrocket and was very unpopular.

But elites love that carbon tax:

A carbon tax is in theory a more efficient way than regulation to reduce carbon emissions.

But after decades of global conferences, forests of reports, dire television documentaries, celebrity appeals, school-curriculum overhauls and media bludgeoning, voters don’t believe that climate change justifies policies that would raise their cost of living and hurt the economy.

So rioters in the ty that gave us the eponymous climate agreement so dear to the heart of the global climate elite are trying to tell their leaders how they really feel about paying for climate change measures that severely affect their pocketbooks but have a neglibible effect on the weather.