From Pierre Gosselins “No Tricks Zone”, some encouraging news; the French have surrendered to common sense.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has pulled the plug on the French prestige project, a super ministry of environment, dubbed “Medad” (Ministère du Développement durable). This piece of good news is brought to us by German warmist website klimaretter.de here in a piece written by Susanne Götze in Paris.
Gone with Medad are its director Jean-Louis Borloo, and with him, the last hope for a real breakthrough in environmental and climate policy in France. As a result, no one believes the CO2 tax promised by Sarkozy 2 years ago has any chance today. Good riddance.
Read the full story here: Great News! Sarkozy Kills French Super Environment Ministry “Medad”
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France is arguably the last great European vestige of Roman culture. It contains relatively little influence from the Barbarians. : )
Viva la France!
John
Who said they were barbarians, the Romans?
Suggest you look again at your potted history
What price Claude Allegre?
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Haven’t you noticed that the MSM runs a wee bit behind in its news reporting? It takes time for them to catch on to what we already know.
I see an enigma there. Proud to be a Barbarian yet inculcated with the Roman thought form. Takes all sorts
The French have always been very good at looking out for number one, they tend to ignore EU laws which don’t suit them.
The trouble with doomsayers is they’re always assuming the status quo technology.
http://www.realclearscience.com/2010/11/15/california_fusion_reactor_is_039miniature_star_on_earth039_238422.html
The whole fossil fuel use, CO2 emission issue may well become moot with the advent of fusion.
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Grey Lensman,
Hey, I respect the French and their historical roots. Even an ethnic Barbarian like me can do that while being reasonable.
John
Sarkozy does not want to see the French economy go up the steps towards Madame le (Vert) Guillotine, having seen Senor Zapatero decapitate the Spanish economy by the green axe. USA has sent its CCX and other Obaminations to the dustbin of history, Australia is dilly-dallying on its version of cap&trade while most other continents are looking at the EU smiling, laughing all the way to their central bank.
I appeal to the EU to wake up from its drunken stupor, the effect of drinking too much green brews, and scrap ENERGY STRANGULATION and all its green agendas before total collapse ensues. Or is it too late?
French dance can-can on Cancun.
The Irish economy has tanked. Although Irish parliamentarians are brushing the risk to weak economies in the EU such as Portugal, Spain, Greece etc, there is a real danger that the fallout n Ireland will affect the rest of the EU. Ireland has received BILLIONS of Euros over the past few decades, I can tell you southern Ireland was very depressing before 1980. 30% of GDP in debt! No more free coal for retirees (Well that’s been the case for some time).
There is a plan to bailout the Irish economy at the cost of yet more billions, something in the order of ~80billion Euros.
Maybe this will cement action against the alarmists.
I am afraid your optimism on the curtailing of carbon taxes is sadly misplaced.
Headline in newspapers today: (h/t to Brute)
“Euro under siege as now Portugal hits panic button”
George Papandreou, the Greek Prime Minister, said new European-wide taxes may now be needed to fund bail-outs.
“We need a mechanism which can be funded through different forms and different ways,” he said. “My proposal is that taxes such as a financial tax or carbon dioxide taxes could be important revenues and resources for funding such a mechanism.”
http://www.montrealgazette.com/business/Euro+under+siege+Portugal+hits+panic+button/3831814/story.html#ixzz15PEOFV6M
We can follow two separate strands here. The overall severe debt crisis in 2007 was easy to forecast by ordinary people but seemingly came as a complete surprise to the ‘experts’ in our ruling elite.
There is a close parallel to climate change with the latest crisis, in as much the Euro is a mad idea but there is so much prestige and power invested in it that none can admit it was ill conceieved or dare let it collapse.
Similarly I suspect there must be many in government who by now have realised the climate ‘crisis’ touted by the ‘experts’ is largely illusory, but they will find it very difficult to change their entrenched position.
Europes ruling elite will do anything to keep the euro and climate change madness afloat, and as the story observes there is a neat synergy because as many of us have always pointed out that a significant part of AGW is to do with raising taxes. That it should raise taxes in order to kep the Euro afloat is breathtaking effrontery.
Incidentally the eurocrats are currently building a highly expensive new central bank in Frankfurt and tearing down a 20 year old Parliament building (They have three in Strasbourg, Luxembourg, and Brussels) in order to build an even more grandiose one.
Of course shelving the project in order to save money hasn’t occurred to them.
The Euro is madness on an epic scale and one on which we aren’t allowed to vote. Climate change is rapidly joining it as an expensive and unnecessary luxury.
Tonyb
Strategies change but the con continues.
This debate is not over in France. The French Academy of Science issued a report last month fully supporting AGW…
Global warning “unquestionably” human related: France
Claire Snegaroff, Agence France-Presse October 29, 2010
Global warming exists and is unquestionably due to human activity, the French Academy of Science said in a report published Thursday and written by 120 scientists from France and abroad.
“Several independent indicators show an increase in global warming from 1975 to 2003. This increase is mainly due to the increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide,” the academy said in conclusion to the report. “The increase in carbon dioxide, and to a lesser degree other greenhouse gases, is unquestionably due to human activity,” said the report, adopted unanimously by academy members.
The report contradicts France’s former education minister Claude Allegre, a geochemist, who published a book called “The Climatic Deception” which claimed that carbon dioxide was not linked to climate change.
The report was commissioned in April by Minister for Research Valerie Pecresse in response to hundreds of environmental scientists who complained that Allegre in particular was disparaging their work. Allegre is a member of the Academy of Sciences and also signed off on the report. “He has the right to evolve,” the academy’s president Jean Salencon said. Pecresse said: “The debate is over.”
But Allegre told AFP that the document was a compromise and “I have not evolved, I still say the same thing, that the exact role of carbon dioxide in the environment has not been shown.”
…The fight goes on…
The thought occurred to me this morning that it is not impossible that people like the Chinese have been quietly agitating to help this global warming madness along for years. After all what better way to destroy the West’s economy and send (energy using) manufacture to China than to bolster the West’s Green movement’s action against the economic indicator of western industry!
OK, the motive is clear, but as I lack any evidence of method or means …
But at least the French seem to have got back some common sense!
Good news if true. The French have a history of saying one thing and doing the exact opposite. I bet the price of fuel in France still rises.
France is still committed to CO neutrality. It’s very hard to find a servicestation that doesn’t pump out E10 instead of E95 gasoline.
They still have megaprojects for windfarms in the books, the only reason they are not started is local protest.
But on the good side all ‘green’ subsidies are being phased out. Leading to protests from the solar panel community.
French love to protest. One day they’ll strike against striking.
Yeah, vive la France!! I escaped the former UK to live in France, and it’s a very refreshing change. From doom, gloom, despondency, “X-Factor”, crass stupidity and a population who have long forgotten what education is, and approaching third world status, to a more up-beat community. The French take no truck from Brussels – if they don’t approve of something, Brussels are unceremoniously told to stuff it. Quite right too.
What have the Romans ever done for us…?
This came about because our President asked our PM M.Fillon to reform his governement. The electoral sustem will change fundamentally in 2014/5 and we need to prepare the path for this reform. I suspect that the durable element will be absorbed by one of the other new ministre and CO² tax will be imposed by Brussells. Brussells is in dire need of money because they continually overspend and cannot be audited because of bad record keeping. In other words, they take whatever money they want in expenses without any recourse to auditors, parlement, the public or anyone else.
TonyB is spot on. This has not gone away. You cannot imagine the financial investment the admins have in the EU and CO².
EUcrats have been literally banking on carbon taxation for years:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2008/10/will-euro-bank-woes-take-down-eu.html
The European Commission’s top economists warned the politicians in the 1990s that the euro might not survive a crisis, at least in its current form. There is no EU treasury or debt union to back it up. The one-size-fits-all regime of interest rates caters badly to the different needs of Club Med and the German bloc.
The euro fathers did not dispute this. But they saw EMU as an instrument to force the pace of political union. They welcomed the idea of a “beneficial crisis”. As ex-Commission chief Romano Prodi remarked, it would allow Brussels to break taboos and accelerate the move to a full-fledged EU economic government.
mosomoso says:
November 15, 2010 at 7:22 pm
“The French are odd. They can seem like the most compromising and compromised of peoples, patiently digesting such monstrosities as the EU, […]”
France has always profited from the EU, getting a lot of agrarian subsidies out of it. The Germans usually pay the French, largely out of a guilt complex. During the times we don’t pay them, we occupy them for unknown reasons. Maybe a kind of European Constructal law.
The trick the Romans benefitted from was that the barbarians wanted to be Romans. The AGWers have benefited from ordinary people (with politicians slavishly following) wanted to be seen to be concerned about THE PLANET. Now that we are all broke there is a new wave emerging but remember politicians rarely lead it.
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Grumbler,
Recently?
John