Anti-enviromentalists are rioting in paris again (live)

[Featherogue]

Yep and every single news organisation is using that today. Quality journalism is dead.

What's also aggravating is when those people inevitably see what damage believing the media causes they'll be so shocked. "How could this have happened??" Easy, people were off doin' shady shit while you were being a gullible walnut lmao.

[nacixems]

The tax is to help prevent the apocalypse by the way. Just throwing that out there.

you been drinking the cool-aid too long. Just throwing that out there. apocalypse lol

[NED funded]

Also fyi, there is no way to address climate change without having consumers get the cost. And because poor people have less money and live more on the edge, they are bound to be affected.

[Hekazi]

Diesel should be taxed, if you can't afford to change and support the environment, then to hell my friend.
Their government halted the petrol taxes that were supposed to be implemented, and that should be enough. Greedy bastards colonized nations for hundreds of years and oppressed everyone to afford a luxurious life in a developed home, now that they are subject to taxes and have to pay for the transition to renewable energy themselves they lost it.
This will go very bad if oil becomes scarce and a privilege only to fundamental businesses and transport.

[Ungeir]

Also fyi, there is no way to address climate change without having consumers get the cost. And because poor people have less money and live more on the edge, they are bound to be affected.

There absolutely are ways to structure emission taxation to be less regressive, or even progressive. For example, let's say instead of the boring old slapping on X% on various goods and services, a rationing system is introduced. Each citizen is given X allotments of CO2 emission, and they simply cannot buy fuel, goods and services beyond this. If we then allow the resale of this rations, the poor suddenly have a very valuable resource they can sell.

But the middle and upper classes do not want a fair system. They want to be able to pay indulgence for their CO2 sins and continue going on international travels by plane, buy new electronics on a regular basis, update the wardrobe regularly, buy exotic foods, etc. Putting a hard cap on consumption is not what they want. So you're right that in the current political climate of absurd hypocrisy the poor will suffer the most from these taxes.

And we've already seen the result of carbon-based taxation: it has almost no effect on consumption. And why? Because taxes go into the public coffers to injected back into the economy, as wages, construction and public consumption. And even worse, in the EU the whole system is set up so CO2 reduction in one place just leads to emission permits being purchased somewhere else.

The whole green tax structure is sick. It's a regressive tax and it's completely decoupled from the actual emissions. For example, the CO2 savings from going vegan can be bought for €10 per year in quotas. That's how low the price on actual emission is put. But the green taxes levied on the general populace are wildly higher than this.

We have a problem in the western world - our public sectors and large corporations have become so inefficient that they suck up an ever increasing price for their services - to be wasted purely on bureaucracy and essentially making the lives of citizens, consumers and employees miserable. This isn't about capitalism vs socialism - it affects public and private sectors alike. It's about us having created systems where organizations aren't allowed to fail to be rebuilt - instead they just get bigger, more inefficient and more corrupt as time passes.

Deregulation won't solve this. Increased regulation won't solve this. Higher taxes won't solve this and lower taxes won't solve this (a total collapse of the system isn't good for the people at the bottom). The yellow vest movement is good because it seems to accept that we need to tear shit down - public and private alike. So we can rebuild a sane economy, whether it's capitalist, socialist or mixed. Can this be done without violence and chaos? Perhaps - technology might end up creating disruption and new paradigms that force the needed changes. On the other hand, technology could end up allowing the sick structures to endure even longer, making the inevitable crash much worse.

TL;DR - everything is going to hell, and it's not about left vs right. It's about bloated bureacracies and unfair economic privileges eventually causing their own downfall.

[Deleted]

Is that why they're emissions are still growing and expected to continue for the following years?? Or why they are building coal power plants in poor countries that don't even meet their own national standards??

Idiots cheering on China while they will be responsible for our efforts to fail.

Yeah... nope. US has twice more emissions per capita than China. Germany has higher emissions per capita than China.

And its not that simple.

They have higher emissions overall because they are actually producing stuff and have massive population, while also trying to do their best. Coal plants are still operating because construction of nuclear plants takes a lot of time and economy is booming, increasing demand for electricity. Yet they manage to have lower pollution per capita than many "clean" countries.

US has rather high emissions despite producing next to nothing. But its ok, at least everyone in US can buy a V8 cheaply. Before you start blaming Trump, Canada and Australia are on par with US.

EU emissions are quite stable, but heavy production has been moved to China. Yet per capita on average emissions are about the same as China, with exception of Germany that has much higher emissions because they refuse to use Nuclear power.

Some data: https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warmin...l#.XA0wXi2B2l4

[Barnabas]

So why then Macron reduced taxes for rich and doesn't tax corporations? This tax has 0 to do with climate change, its time to realise that politicians are not honest people.

politicians were never honest people to begin with. i dont understand this supposed new found revelation.

[Barnabas]

Because the rich minority does not care about the environment, they aren't allowed to care.
If they care about the environment they get less profit and then they lose to the competition that doesn't give a fuck.

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The rest of the world is living substandard because the EU and US refuse to do its share.
China is building dams and solar farms everywhere, even on the water!

Yeah china is the global leader in climate change because they showed some footage of a few solar plants.

Idiots like macron probably don't realize 25% of carbon emission are the result of poor land use. China has managed to degrade 40% of the soil in their country. They are taking steps to deal with that but are also falling on the faces. They spent billions on trees just to have sandstorms cover their newly planted forest in sand. Investing in something simple like grasslands has a bigger impact on repairing the soil and reducing emissions than absurd taxes because the left, that tout themselves at being smarter, are as a dumb as rocks. They are well meaning people though and care. The pedestal they are creating for a country that ignores science also is getting ridiculous.

https://theconversation.com/chinas-f...security-83678

This is the result of china's soil policy to date.

[Collegeguy]

Australia is such a CO2 monster there. Need to put some sanctions on them.

[Turaska]

It's not about the environment... it's about inequality and a general dislike for macron. *facepalm*

[Aggrophobic]

It's not about the environment... it's about inequality and a general dislike for macron. *facepalm*

Or rather people not understanding how the world works and it makes them confused and angry for no real reason. Education would be more help than a new president but sadly, they just don't get that.

[Theodarzna]

It strikes me that the profound confusion, even incredulity, displayed by the French commentariat—and even more, the world commentariat—in the face of each successive “Acte” of the Gilets Jaunes drama, now rapidly approaching its insurrectionary climax, is a result of a near total inability to take account of the ways that power, labour, and the movements ranged against power, have changed over the last 50 years, and particularly, since 2008. Intellectuals have for the most part done an extremely poor job understanding these changes.

Let me begin by offering two suggestions as to the source of some of the confusion:

1. in a financialised economy, only those closest to the means of money-creation (essentially, investors and the professional-managerial classes) are in a position to employ the language of universalism. As a result, any political claims as based in particular needs and interests, tended to be treated as manifestation of identity politics, and in the case of the social base of the GJ, therefore, cannot be imagined it as anything but proto-fascist.

2. since 2011, there has been a worldwide transformation of common sense assumptions about what participating in a mass democratic movement should mean—at least among those most likely to do so. Older “vertical” or vanguardist models of organization have rapidly given way to an ethos of horizontality one where (democratic, egalitarian) practice and ideology are ultimately two aspects of the same thing. Inability to understand this gives the false impression movements like GJ are anti-ideological, even nihilistic.

Let me provide some background for these assertions.

Since the US jettisoning of the gold standard in 1971, we have seen a profound shift in the nature of capitalism. Most corporate profits are now no longer derived from producing or even marketing anything, but in the manipulation of credit, debt, and “regulated rents.” As government and financial bureaucracies become so intimately intertwined it’s increasingly difficult to tell one from the other, wealth and power—particularly, the power to create money (that is, credit)—also become effectively the same thing. (This was what we were drawing attention to in Occupy Wall Street when we talked about the “1%’—those with the ability to turn their wealth into political influence, and political influence back into wealth.) Despite this, politicians and media commentators systematically refuse to recognize the new realities, for instance, in public discourse one must still speak of tax policy as if it is primarily a way of government raising revenue to fund its operations, whereas in fact it is increasingly simply a way of (1) ensuring the means of credit-creation can never be democratized (as only officially approved credit is acceptable in payment of taxes), and (2) redistributing economic power from one social sector to another.

Since 2008 governments have been pumping new money into the system, which, owing to the notorious Cantillon effect, has tended to accrue overwhelmingly to those who already hold financial assets, and their technocratic allies in the professional managerial classes. In France of course these are precisely the Macronists. Members of these classes feel that they are the embodiments of any possible universalism, their conceptions of the universal being firmly rooted in the market, or increasingly, that atrocious fusion of bureaucracy and market which is the reigning ideology of what’s called the “political center.” Working people in this new centrist reality are increasingly denied any possibility of universalism, since they literally cannot afford it. The ability to act out of concern for the planet, for instance, rather than the exigencies of sheer survival, is now a direct side-effect of forms of money creation and managerial distribution of rents; anyone who is forced to think only of their own or their family’s immediate material needs is seen as asserting a particular identity; and while certain identities might be (condescendingly) indulged, that of “the white working class” can only be a form of racism. One saw the same thing in the US, where liberal commentators managed to argue that if Appalachian coal miners voted for Bernie Sanders, a Jewish socialist, it must nonetheless somehow be an expression of racism, as with the strange insistence that the Giles Jaunes must be fascists, even if they haven’t realized it.

These are profoundly anti-democratic instincts.

To understand the appeal of the movement—that is, of the sudden emergence and wildfire spread of real democratic, even insurrectionary politics—I think there are two largely unnoticed factors to be taken into consideration.

The first is that financialized capitalism involves a new alignment of class forces, above all ranging the techno-managerials (more and more them employed in pure make-work “bullshit jobs,” as part of the neoliberal redistribution system) against a working class that is now better seen as the “caring classes”—as those who nurture, tend, maintain, sustain, more than old-fashioned “producers.” One paradoxical effect of digitization is that while it has made industrial production infinitely more efficient, it has rendered health, education, and other caring sector work less so, this combined with diversion of resources to the administrative classes under neoliberalism (and attendant cuts to the welfare state) has meant that, practically everywhere, it has been teachers, nurses, nursing-home workers, paramedics, and other members of the caring classes that have been at the forefront of labor militancy. Clashes between ambulance workers and police in Paris last week might be taken as a vivid symbol of the new array of forces. Again, public discourse has not caught up with the new realities, but over time, we will start having to ask ourselves entirely new questions: not what forms of work can be automated, for instance, but which we would actually want to be, and which we would not; how long we are willing to maintain a system where the more one’s work immediately helps or benefits other human beings, the less you are likely to be paid for it.

Second, the events of 2011, starting with the Arab Spring and passing through the Squares movements to Occupy, appear to have marked a fundamental break in political common sense. One way you know that a moment of global revolution has indeed taken place is that ideas considered madness a very short time before have suddenly become the ground assumptions of political life. The leaderless, horizontal, directly democratic structure of Occupy, for instance, was almost universally caricatured as idiotic, starry-eyed and impractical, and as soon as the movement was suppressed, pronounced the reason for its “failure.” Certainly it seemed exotic, drawing heavily not only on the anarchist tradition, but on radical feminism, and even, certain forms of indigenous spirituality. But it has now become clear that it has become the default mode for democratic organizing everywhere, from Bosnia to Chile to Hong Kong to Kurdistan. If a mass democratic movement does emerge, this is the form it can now be expected to take. In France, Nuit Debout might have been the first to embrace such horizontalist politics on a mass scale, but the fact that a movement originally of rural and small-town workers and the self-employed has spontaneously adopted a variation on this model shows just how much we are dealing with a new common sense about the very nature of democracy.

About the only class of people who seem unable to grasp this new reality are intellectuals. Just as during Nuit Debout, many of the movement’s self-appointed “leadership” seemed unable or unwilling to accept the idea that horizontal forms of organization were in fact a form of organization (they simply couldn’t comprehend the difference between a rejection of top-down structures and total chaos), so now intellectuals of left and right insist that the Gilets Jaunes are “anti-ideological”, unable to understand that for horizontal social movements, the unity of theory and practice (which for past radical social movements tended to exist much more in theory than in practice) actually does exist in practice. These new movements do not need an intellectual vanguard to provide them with an ideology because they already have one: the rejection of intellectual vanguards and embrace of multiplicity and horizontal democracy itself.

There is a role for intellectuals in these new movements, certainly, but it will have to involve a little less talking and a lot more listening.

None of these new realities, whether of the relations of money and power, or the new understandings of democracy, likely to go away anytime soon, whatever happens in the next Act of the drama. The ground has shifted under our feet, and we might do well to think about where our allegiances actually lie: with the pallid universalism of financial power, or those whose daily acts of care make society possible.

(source)

Calling it simply Anti-Environment is kinda a sign of the powerful ignorance among many about these sorts of events and how to define them.

[Nihilist74]

Does France already have a carbon footprint tax on companies, subsidies for natural gas vehicles,subsidies for alternative fuel vehicles, subsidies for electric or hybrid cars? How good is the train system in France? Is it easy to get around there with public transportation? Is this the best measure they could have taken?

[Deleted]

Calling it simply Anti-Environment is kinda a sign of the powerful ignorance among many about these sorts of events and how to define them.

Its not done by mistake or from ignorance. Its media doing its job shilling for corporations/politicians, attempt to demonise protesters so protests would seem like stupid. It is very intentional. Brainwashing of masses.

[Deleted]

Australia is such a CO2 monster there. Need to put some sanctions on them.

like US was any better, where the vast majority of cars burn through over 30-35 liters of fuel for every 100km driven

[Collegeguy]

Or rather people not understanding how the world works and it makes them confused and angry for no real reason. Education would be more help than a new president but sadly, they just don't get that.

Education is not the reason why farts come out of Macrons mouth when he talks. Unless your saying Macron could use some education on being a better politician.

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like US was any better, where the vast majority of cars burn through over 30-35 liters of fuel for every 100km driven

Sanction them too. Like I give a shit.

[Malikath]

-snip-

i love how you think any of that matters compared to the sheer amount of pollution china is pumping out every minute.

it doesn't, by the way.

[Blobfish]

China is still the biggest polluter of C02 as recent data shows.

Not Australia , like that other graph showed

https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warmin...l#.XA1t92gzaUk

The picture that emerges from these figures is one where—in general—developed countries and major emerging economy nations lead in total carbon dioxide emissions. Developed nations typically have high carbon dioxide emissions per capita, while some developing countries lead in the growth rate of carbon dioxide emissions. Obviously, these uneven contributions to the climate problem are at the core of the challenges the world community faces in finding effective and equitable solutions.

[Sorcath]

Wake the fuck up.

Children with no value, respect or any responsibilities don't get to weigh in on a conversation that you clearly are not qualified to be involved with. As soon as I have a question for an un-taxed adolescent with only social responsibilities, I'll direct all my questions your way.

[Deleted]

China is still the biggest polluter of C02 as recent data shows.

Not Australia , like that other graph showed

Those are different metrics. One shows per capita, one total.

Per capita is the one that matters because more people = more pollution. Its basic logic. Bigger country, more people, more pollution. But per capita shows actual effort to reduce pollution, which is close to 0 in Australia and US.