[MCN] About the Yellow Vest riots in France: They want, among other things, "a countrywide transition from fossil fuels"

[Lance Olsen]

Excerpt from p. 43, Harpers, August 2019 article, “A play with no end. What the Gilets Jaunes really want”

“I asked Josset about the policies he hoped to put in place with the weekly disruptions. He suggested I read the movement’s demands, published in leaflets and online.”

“Among other things, the Gilets called for a reinstatement of the tax on the superrich, … more funding for pubic school, hospitals, child care… and a country wide transition from fossil fuels through progressive measures, in which the rich pay for the transition…………….”

Their push for a transition from fossil fuels puts the Yellow Vests in accord with the Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for Future, and, in the US with the Sunshine Movement and, increasingly, the Democratic Party. Actually, the mainstreaming of a transition from fossil fuels has begun to show up even in the ranks of America’s Republicans other than the radical right. And it’s been hard not to notice that some on the right have been loudest in saying that the Yellow Vest uprising is proof that a carbon tax alone will cause social unrest.
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“Full of recent references and statistics, Harvesting the Biosphere adds to the growing chorus of warnings about 
the current trajectory of human activity on a finite planet, of which climate change is only one dimension. 

“One can quibble with with some assumptions or tweak Smil's calculations, but the bottom line will not change, 
only the time it may take humanity to reach a crisis point.”

Stephen Running. “Approaching the Limits” Science 15 March 2013.

Book review. Harvesting the Biosphere: What we have taken from Nature. by Vaclav Smil .  
MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2012. 315 pp. $29, £19.95. ISBN 9780262018562.

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