This new French carbon tax was scheduled to go into law on Jan1, 2010. The tax was steep: 17 euros per ton of carbon dioxide (USD $24.40). In a stunning move, and surely a blow to warmists everywhere, the tax has been found unconstitutional and thrown out. Originally found here (Google Translation).
Lord Monckton was kind enough to assist me in deciphering the meaning of the ruling and writes:
In France, if at least 60 Deputies of the House and 60 Senators appeal to the Constitutional Council, it has the power to pronounce on the constitutionality of a proposed law – in the present case, the 2010 national budget of France, which contained enabling provisions (loi deferee) for a carbon levy. The Council found that these enabling provisions were unconstitutional on two grounds: that the exemptions contained within the provisions for a carbon levy vitiated the primary declared purpose of the levy, to combat carbon emissions and hence “global warming”; and that the exemptions would cause the levy to fall disproportionately on gasoline and heating oils and not on other carbon emissions, thereby breaching the principle that taxation should be evenly and fairly borne.
The Press release from the French Constitutional Council is here in English (Google Translated) and in original French
Here’s a Deustch-Welle news article on the reversal.
France’s Constitutional Council says the country’s proposed carbon tax is illegal. This is a severe blow to French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s plans to fight climate change.
France’s Constitutional Council has struck down a carbon tax that was planned to take effect on January 1st. The council, which ensures the constitutionality of French legislation, said too many polluters were exempted in the measure and the tax burden was not fairly distributed.
It was estimated that 93 percent of industrial emissions outside of fuel use, including the emissions of more than 1,000 of France’s top polluting industrial sites, would be exempt from the tax, which would have charged 17 euros per ton of emitted carbon dioxide.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has argued the tax is necessary to combat climate change and reduce the country’s dependence on oil.
However, the council’s ruling is a severe blow to both Sarkozy’s environmental plan as well as France’s budget for 2010. The government now has to find a way to come up with about 4.1 billion euros in revenue that was expected from the tax.
h/t to WUWT reader Dirk H
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r (11:20:14) : Don’t worry!, they got the power, they got the money, we got the brains!
Hate to rain on the parade but here in the land of OZ our illustrious leaders KRudd and Wrong are not giving up on the ETS. Last night I went looking for mention of anything about the French rejection of the carbon tax in the MSM. All I found was this or a variant of it http://www.smh.com.au/environment/ets-cash-bonus-for-millions-of-families-20091229-lir3.html
So us clever Australians can introduce the Everything Tax Scheme and only the rich will have to pay more rest of us will get a bonus! It seems their logic is that one can increase the cost for the energy sector and they will not pass the cost on. All that extra cash can then be paid to families. Believe that and this also becomes fact http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies there really are fairies.
The carbon tax creates the invisible tax of inflation. Inflation particularly on food. Your bread is being taxed peasant. The bonuses are bribes to keep you quiet. The stucture will keep you dependant on government hand-outs. Like chains. Your freedom: gone. The aristocracy holds the chain. Of course this is only until the ecomomy as a whole crashes down. No manufacturing= no economy.
What can you do? You have words. The word is mightier than the sword. The is the internet. Send and e-mail to 10 of your friends. Ask them to pass it to 10 of thier friends.
Its up to you now.
How about a import tariff on China. Then turn around and use that money to help China fix its pollution problem? ( I don’t mean carbon. I mean basic stuff like sulpher dioxide, lead and mercurey, etc.)
Lets get this right – everyone else destroys their industry except the French.
To those of us used to the French in the EEC this is no surprise at all.
cheers. the dominoes are falling more
Germany also works the same way with its supreme court. You can query the court on a proposed law prior to its passage. In the US, however, you can not deal in hypotheticals. If there is a tax passed, then and only then can you start to go through the court system and perhaps make it to the supremes.
Speaking as another person living in France and loving the French, I far prefer the carbon tax to any cap and trade scheme to enrich bankers, especially since it will go straight back out towards funding energy-saving initiatives. There’s really nothing unusual about taxing fossil fuels in Europe and 4 centimes per gallon of diesel is virtually nothing so they’ll reintroduce it in some way. However they also have zero percent loans for any home insulation, geothermal heating or similar energy saving project. In about a year I’ll be taking advantage of that thank you very much. A tax is honest but cap and trade just isn’t and the evidence clearly shows that reducing the price of fuel leads to people just wasting it – like buying gas-guzzlers for example.
I meant per litre of diesel sorry! ie from around 100 to 104 centimes. By comparison the Goldman Sachs fatcat oil speculation tax is around 50 dollars a barrel and it got as high as 100 dollars a barrel in 2007.
IndianaBones (23:37:59)
My thanks to you for posting the link to Solomon’s excellent series of articles “The Deniers” featured in the National Post 2-3 years ago.
It was that series of articles that moved me to get off my duff and start doing my own digging for climate information.
To read example after example of what many of the top scientists in a variety of fields related to climate science had to endure even as far back as 1990, was an eye opener to me. It wasn’t a surprise to me when “climategate” unfolded.
I recommend this series highly.
MikeO (12:03:16) :
Hate to rain on the parade but here in the land of OZ our illustrious leaders KRudd and Wrong are not giving up on the ETS.
What about Mr. Spencer, the man fasting in a tower on his farm now x 38 days?
He’s your future. The true nature of the scam is “settled”. I tried to give a strong devastating post indicating that this crap will simply not happen, at an Au. news website where the story was presented. But the comments seemed to be cut off at 40. Maybe they can’t moderate all their comment threads? But such input has to continue regardless and elsewhere.
[I’d post what I tried to post there, but somehow I’ve just now managed to erase it from wordpad. I’ll try to find it and I’d like to anyway, but so far I don’t know how.]
Man in a Shed,
Of course not. Every country needs to have industry. There is no economy without industry.
The US and the UK think that they are now “service” economies. They think that banking is their business. But there are only three reasons to borrow money:
Productive: The use of borrowed funds to purchase something such as a machine that produces more in output than it cost.
Consumptive: The use of borrowed money to purchase something that is consumed (a house, food, vacation, etc.)
Ponzi: The use of borrowed funds to purchase an item with the intent to sell it to someone else at a higher price. At certain times this describes the stock market, commodities, and housing.
Consumption and Ponzi can fall apart and you would still have an economy. If production goes away, you have nothing.
Right now in the US, we have nothing but the Ponzi stock market. How long will that last?
Carbon tax will kill any industry left in the west.
Carbon tax will cause severe inflation on food prices.
Carbon tax will not help the earth because industry and its pollution simply move to China.
Carbon tax increases dependence on the Government for handouts.
Carbon tax uses emotional coercion to suppress opposition.
Carbon tax is to distract you from real pollution problems and economic fraud.
Brief response to JamesG (13:00:43)
Reducing the price of fuel also leads to increase in standard of living for any country truely interested in doing that. Availability of fuel is necessary to how we got here as “developed”. Iran can’t even refine oil to gas.
Why don’t you even have enough money to insulate your house? Why are you waiting? Nuclear availability allows it?
Taxes are not “honest” in practice. Here in the U.S., it’s enrich your buddy time big time, or Commie in the Candy Store Time for the Obama Adm.. They want all the already created “wealth” that exists, including what any citizen might do to accumulate any “wealth” – as they can always redefine it if you have “too much”, so they can redistribute it, you know, “equally”. It’s the biggest “windfall profit” scam ever imagined, going to the Government, for the exact benefit to it and other special interests.
Apart from the Nuclear “deterrent” , France can’t defend itself. That’s why the U.S. is in Nato. Maybe France should do that before you insulate your house?
Jct: The good news of ClimateGate starts to spread!
(Perhaps already posted.)
Not unrelated:
N.D. likely to sue Minnesota over carbon tax
http://www.bismarcktribune.com/news/local/article_a6fafd5a-f409-11de-bb24-001cc4c03286.html
There is one last thing not mentioned about the way the french are governed which is fundamently different to you anglo-saxons.
In France the government leans toward encouragement as opposed to punishment. We get upto 50% rebates on green energy projects directly refunded in our tax payments or by cheque from the tax office. The anglo-saxon way is to beat you around the wallet until you do what we say. I know its defeatist but you will never COMPLETELY stop the AGW faith even if the climate dips violently so what would I choose to be taxed like?. Carbon tax direct. I could not bear to see another con banker gaining from my loss and that is all the anglos want. Obama, brown et al are keeping all their mates in the financial secteur rich. And now I see that brown is trying the climate trick on the brits to get re-elected. “If you don’t vote me in you will wreck our economy”. Exactly the same old tactic. I’ll scare you into committing economic suicide with me in charge.
It does appear to be a delay in carbon tax, not necessarily any kind of repudiation on any level.
However, it is also possible that what has happened in Australia, France and Copenhagen reveal that the political will to defeat this “tax on everything” is indeed quite powerful. I would like to think politicians are taking note.
Since the subject is Europe, will someone explain to me the difference between a “sustainable” community and a ghetto.
Summarizing a few comments above: “The French court basically ruled against it because it ’t taxing enough people, not because it (AGW tax increases) are economically wrong, based on a flawed premise of man-made global warming caused by man-released CO, and will destroy the economy of the nation passing the taxes.”
I agree: That’s what this court did say.
However, the purpose of the new tax on automobile fuel was to raise money. And the only they (the French government) could get this tax passed was to exempt the hundreds of thousands of businesses and the basic producers of their economy from the tax. So, when they have to the tax on January 20, must now spread his tax out on a whole LOT of other businesses and groups who will now have to pay.
And they won’t like to see THEIR taxes raised, when before (with the fuel surcharge that has been declared illegal) the ones paying are the automobile drivers, farmers, truckers, and taxi drivers. And they have less influence (less money) to influence the government.
He () now has to pass the tax law again, and now has t face more opposition to the new law from a wider base, and that base has seen the first version defeated.
Momentum can shift, though, as you said, this is not the final tax bill.
yonason (10:58:48) :
From your link:
As a full-blooded Italian, I must protest.
It is a well-known fact that Italy has never lost a war. It just keeps switching sides until it ends up with the winner.
🙂
Governments just don’t all of a sudden simply toss out some MAJOR legislation. On the other hand, since this has vote has occurred there MUST HAVE been support among the politicians to squash this new tax. This means that the occurrence of this is not an accident at all.
If by the end of January they have a new bill in place, then obviously all those exemptions was the issue. However if the bill and legislation drags on for a longer period of time, then this is clearly an attempt by the French government to wait and see what other nations are going to do in regards to carbon trading. This ploy allows the government to stall and wait, yet at the same time remain perfectly politically correct in their stance on AGW.
Green Turtle
To the moderators : I think that all comments on France in general, military history and alike, which are completely out of subject, should be deleted.
In France, being a climate skeptic is difficult partly because it is associated with an alleged “american point of view”, the connotation of this being the very symmetric clichés that the ones appearing in this thread.
I’m not interested at all here in defending my country. I do not say that it is better than any other. I just say that there is a risk that a french warmist make use of some of the previous comments to say something like : “Look ! How can you support those anti-french skeptics ?”
Yes, such kind of “argument” is abundantly used here, in France.
Please, help us to avoid having to deal with it.
Of course, the present comment should be considered as out of topic as well, so should be deleted at the same time.
HereticFringe, the federal income tax in the US is unconstitutional:
Aaron Russo: America – Freedom To Fascism
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1656880303867390173#
I always wondered about the constitutionality of taxes like this in the US. How does taxing certain products randomly because the government wants more money not violate equal protection? Why can you impose large taxes on legal products such as tobacco and alcohol, with the only reason being a desire for more government income, and not have equal taxation policies on other products?
I’m afraid Lord Monckton’s interpretation of the event is uncomplete hence the unjustified cheering.
As a French, I confirm what others have said : the French carbon tax has been repelled temporarily, not because there is too much tax (for the guys at the Conseil Constitutionnel) but because there is NOT ENOUGH tax, in the form of too many exemptions.
So the small agitated guy we put at the head of France will try to revive his tax in a way or another because he has been encouraged by the Council to tax more, not less ! Yeah, don’t worry, our politicians are as disconnected from the base as yours (2/3 of the French are against the carbon tax according to polls, which doesn’t prevent Sarkozy from passing the law because the State is broke and taxpayer’s money is urgently needed).
The thing which may save the day is that Carbozy won’t be able to tax lorry drivers, fishermen… (exempted so far to avoid violent manifestations as they know how to do). If he tax them, there will be very disrupting strikes, especially from truckers and there is no way he will risk that just 5 months from regional elections (quite important here). If he doesn’t, his law will be again rejected because of exemptions now considered unconstitutional.
It’s as if he holds the AGW scam tiger by the tail and has no idea how to let it go. But in France, we have ZERO skeptical media, ALL of them are climate change hysterics, so who knows…
Viva la France!
I am half French, if that matters.
I love France and the French.
I just don’t like:
bad science,
big government,
waste,
fraud,
lies,
pollution,
and emotional coercion
I like good food.
Maybe that is why I like the French. : )