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posted by martyb on Sunday November 18 2018, @12:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the everybody-should-pay-their-fair-share dept.

On Saturday, November 16th, around 282,000 people blocked roads and highways all over France. The protesters, nicknamed the gillets jaunes after the yellow warning vests they wore, had organized through Facebook. Their beef: the increase in environmental taxes on gasoline, on top of a number of other tax increases.

We don't disagree with having to pay more to help act for the environment and fight climate change, was the general opinion, but why should it be only the little folks who have to pay while the elite can easily grin and bear it -- why not tax also all that heavy fuel burned by aeroplanes and tanker ships?

The action, which persisted throughout the day, resulted in over 100 wounded and one tragic death when a mother driving her child to hospital panicked.

The protesters do have a point. While media and politics rightly, if very, very much belatedly, are warning about climate change, the alternatives proposed clearly are not to be taken seriously.

The hard choices we need to face apparently come down to cities investing in smart cameras to fine visitors based on production year and type of their automobile. Public transport investing will come, but not to the countryside where car/ride sharing, Uber and similar services simply are not viable; Tesla and relatives are on another price planet for ordinary people.

As to the EU's emission trading system (ETS) that should drive industry to climate change action: news broke on the same day as the gillets jaunes actions that Britain -- on the verge of leaving the EU -- is one of the biggest net exporters of such credits: Britain had 900 million of these credits too much, for the years 2013-2015 alone.


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday November 19 2018, @02:13AM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday November 19 2018, @02:13AM (#763729)

    Houston cleaned up its act in large part by pushing gasoline refinement offshore, when Rita and Katrina took out the offshore refineries they moved it back onshore and polluted worse than ever for at least a year (I don't know if/when they ever got it cleaned up again, we left town in 2006, in large part due to the lack of air quality.) Worse: when the refineries got a green light to pollute in the cause of keeping the gasoline flowing, all the other plants turned off their scrubbers too - those things are expensive to run, ya know? If just one plant is polluting, it's easy to finger it, maybe even do something about it. When they're all doing it and some have a free pass from Washington to do so, apparently the local EPA is toothless.

    I knew a little about the worst offender in our neighborhood, right at the end of NASA road 1 in Seabrook, French owned plant, seemed to care about as much about the locals as Union Carbide cared about Bhopal. At every opportunity they'd be discharging something or another whether it was massive amounts of groundwater (+ who knows what) on the surface or giant billowing black clouds from the stacks when a tropical storm was approaching.

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