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EU unveils sweeping climate change plan:
The European Union has announced a raft of climate change proposals aimed at pushing it towards its goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2050.
A dozen draft proposals, which still need to be approved by the bloc's 27 member states and the EU parliament, were announced on Wednesday.
They include plans to tax jet fuel and effectively ban the sale of petrol and diesel powered cars within 20 years.
The proposals, however, could face years of negotiations.
The plans triggered serious infighting at the European Commission, the bloc's administrative arm, as the final tweaks were being made, sources told the AFP news agency.
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EU Unveils Sweeping Climate Change Plan
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"Love your country but never trust its government."
-- from a hand-painted road sign in central Pennsylvania
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Sunday July 18 2021, @02:46PM (2 children)
That is because the other stuff is already exempt :-)
This law change would introduce taxes where there were none, so they had to add an exemption. Not sure why they did it in such a ham-fisted way. Normally they are more subtle about keeping their privileges. Not sure if this was just a lack of diplomatic skill, or they feel that they are strong enough to pull it off brazenly and nobody will be able to do much about it.
Possibly this is a distraction, to draw attention to this exemption while allowing the "proper" exemptions to be passed. This exemption might be "given up" publicly later on, satiating the protests but allowing them what they wanted anyway.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @03:47PM (1 child)
"Ham-fisted" loses meaning in a society that increasingly see things in black and white. Increasingly in our society people and ideas are being clumped into false dichotomies - you are with us, or you are against us. The notion that somebody can support an idea, yet not support things claimed to be motivated by an effort to further that idea, is a notion increasingly lost on our society.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Unixnut on Sunday July 18 2021, @05:44PM
Hmm, I was going to respond with saying the "Black and White" society is a typically USA thing, where very much the idea of compromise is unheard of. Unfortunately it does seem to have been expanding beyond the USA to the English speaking world, so even the UK is having a similar attitude now. It does not bode well for a stable and peaceful society, because by its very nature, a society without compromise and tolerance of others must be authoritarian in order to suppress those others. You end up with two sides locked in a power struggle over who gets to control the machinery of state to suppress the other.