[MCN] Many say carbon tax will cause social unrest. Many of those believe it. All point to French Yellow Vests' outrage, & get it all wrong

[Lance Olsen]

Excerpts from pp 41-42 of Harper’s August 2019 article, “A play with no end. What the Gilet Jaunes really want"

French president Emmanuelle Macron “abolished a long-standing tax on assets above $1.5 million, replacing it with a more modest property tax that exempted other forms of wealth. He reduced government support for university students and for low-income housing, and he made it easier for businesses to fire employees. He pushed for the privatization of highways and railways and airports. At the same time, he oversaw continuing cuts to public transit, public hospitals, and public schools, along with the closure of maternity wards, childcare centers, and post offices in already underserved areas, primarily in rural, semi rural, and what was called ‘peri-urban’ France, the struggling belts of development surrounding the more prosperous cities.”

“Part of what drove the Gilets to agitation, to the state of what they called ra-le-bol — a particularly French expression of exasperation, nearly untranslatable, that means something like ‘the bowel is filled’ — is that the parties of the putative left in recent years appeared indistinguishable from those of the right.”

“Then came the carbon tax.”

“It was not lost on the the protestors that the poor and the rich have very different carbon footprints. I heard the same complaint from Gilets repeatedly: ‘The rich, they are the ones taking the airplanes. They are the ones consuming more’.”

“During a March 16 protest along the Champs-Elysees — the eighteenth Saturday in a row on which the Gilet had been on it, and a day of extraordinary vandalism eclipsed only by the violence of early December — a Gilet named Claude Josset, sixty-four years old, a factory mechanic from the suburbs of Paris who oversaw the production of concrete, wore a smile on his face as he explained that ‘the rich have a problem before them now’."


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Elizabeth Kolbert: " And I think the point that Bill has made, and I agree with it, is maybe we can avoid the worst possible future. But I don’t think at this point we can avoid a lot, a lot, a lot of damage.”

Bill McKibben: “Look, Betsy’s right. So we’re not playing for stopping climate change. We’re playing maybe for being able to slow it down to the point where it doesn’t make civilizations impossible. That’s an open question. There are scientists who tell you we’re already past that point. The consensus, at least for the moment, is that we’ve got a narrow and closing window, but that if we move with everything we have, then, perhaps, we’ll be able to squeeze a fair amount of our legacy through it. But Betsy is right, an already very difficult century is going to become a lot harder no matter what we do. It’s at this point trying to keep it from becoming not a difficult and even miserable century but a literally impossible one.”
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/bill-mckibben-and-elizabeth-kolbert-on-the-un-extinction-report <https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/bill-mckibben-and-elizabeth-kolbert-on-the-un-extinction-report>

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“A new area of study is the field that some of us are beginning to call social traps. The term refers to situations in society that contain traps formally like a fish trap, where men or whole societies get themselves started in some direction or some set of relationships that later prove to be unpleasant or lethal and that they see no easy way to back out of or to avoid."

John Platt. Social Traps. American Psychologist, August 1973

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