Second worst results in modern Swiss history
Swiss voters Sunday overwhelmingly rejected an initiative that would have scrapped the Alpine country’s value-added-tax system and replaced it with a carbon tax. Roughly 92% of voters opposed the initiative while 8% supported the measure.
The initiative would have encouraged Swiss households to use renewable energy sources, including solar and wind, which would have been exempt from taxes. The initiative, which was introduced by the Green Liberal Party of Switzerland, was designed to help lower carbon emissions and reduce global warming. –Neil Maclucas, The Wall Street Journal, 8 March 2015
A proposal replacing the main consumer tax with a new levy on non-renewable energy has suffered a blistering defeat in Sunday’s nationwide ballot. The proposal by the Liberal Green Party won only 8% of the vote, according to final official results. Sunday’s result was the second worst in modern Swiss history. —Swiss Info, 8 March 2015
h/t to The GWPF
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Very decisive common sense from the Swiss public.
More common sense, this time suprisingly from the California courts where a UCLA researcher has won a
lawsuit after being fired for whistleblowing about corruption in environmental science research at UCLA:
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/415100/victory-academic-freedom-and-defeat-junk-environmental-science-david-french
Incredibly as well as other unethical appointments the fired whistleblower had even pointed out that the lead researcher had a fraudulent degree, the ‘research’ led to new particulate emission laws.
(From link posted by Larry Ledwick in ‘Tips and Notes’)
Any bets as to if the Guardian reports it?
This is why Christiana Figueres, IPCC chief made the comment in the Guardian interview January 13th 2014 that democracy is a poor political system for fighting global warming. Chinese communism is the best model.
The UN, the chief promulgators of the cAGW fraud and one of the main recipients of the money from carbon taxes obviously have no issue of the iron fist of totalitarianism being used to “solve” a non-existent ‘problem.”
Wow, consider the lack of love for the VAT most days, it must be feeling pretty good this day in the sun.
I figure the US will institute a VAT to get more of that taxed-once Roth IRA money calling out to congresscritters everywhere.
My prediction would be that any such tax will be a straight-forward sales tax. It’s bat-shit crazy calculating VAT, plus it gives government more information about your business than they need.
“the proposal by the Liberal Green Party won only 8% of the vote”
But on the bright side they did a lot better than I thought they would.
Quite wrong! The Swiss Greens hoped for a much bigger support because the lefty Swiss MSM do constantly wail about the “devilish evil CO2 from fossil fuels” and the “terrible, terrible climate disasters” which will come true if we don’t stop our “sinful fossil fuel burning”…
Well, this never-ending Green propaganda in all Swiss MSM seems to be not such effective as the Greens did hope, luckily… 😉
Go Switzerland 🙂
[snip – off topic rant -mod]
Given the beauty of he Swiss landscape, why would they want wind turbines blocking out the view?
jimS It is not just wind turbines they do not want, recently they banned the building of new mosques.
Wrong: The building of mosques is still allowed because of religious freedom. Only the building of minarets – as a symbol of power – was banned by a national referendum.
WSJ article title search = full article.
https://www.google.ca/webhp?complete=0#complete=0&q=Swiss+Voters+Reject+Initiative+to+Replace+VAT+System+With+Carbon+Tax
If anyone is wondering about above URL, it switches off the annoying Google auto complete.
https://www.google.ca/webhp?complete=0
Filler
https://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0
Filler
https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?complete=0
If they had voted in favour of the CO2 tax to replace the VAT, what would happen if the CO2 tax was “successful”, and everyone actually did switch to renewable energy sources? Wouldn’t there be no tax at all then? I thought the whole point of a CO2 tax was to stop people emitting the stuff.
You have to heat your home and even if you burn wood, the CO2 police come and hassle you. Swiss realize they don’t want to freeze just as I hope people here in Upstate NY realize they face annihilation if the CO2 scheme runs its full course.
These Greens want to get rid of our cows, too!
If they switched to renewables, there wouldn’t be a whole lot to tax, anyway.
This is out there I know, but can Willis or anyone have a look at this article from NASA. Or am I missing something?
NASA states that co2 acts as a thermostat and sends energy/heat back into space. Here’s a quote below———— and here’s the link— http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/solarstorm-power.html
“This was the biggest dose of heat we’ve received from a solar storm since 2005,” says Martin Mlynczak of NASA Langley Research Center. “It was a big event, and shows how solar activity can directly affect our planet.”
Mlynczak is the associate principal investigator for the SABER instrument onboard NASA’s TIMED satellite. SABER monitors infrared emissions from Earth’s upper atmosphere, in particular from carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitric oxide (NO), two substances that play a key role in the energy balance of air hundreds of km above our planet’s surface.
“Carbon dioxide and nitric oxide are natural thermostats,” explains James Russell of Hampton University, SABER’s principal investigator. “When the upper atmosphere (or ‘thermosphere’) heats up, these molecules try as hard as they can to shed that heat back into space.”
That’s what happened on March 8th when a coronal mass ejection (CME) propelled in our direction by an X5-class solar flare hit Earth’s magnetic field. (On the “Richter Scale of Solar Flares,” X-class flares are the most powerful kind.) Energetic particles rained down on the upper atmosphere, depositing their energy where they hit. The action produced spectacular auroras around the poles and significant1 upper atmospheric heating all around the globe.”
@Neville last paragraph? was that march 8 2015 or 2005, ( sorry I just read it again it was 2012) An X5 is not all that strong when it gets beyond X10 things will get dicey but the main effects are on our electrical grids and satellites and any astronauts up there but as far as heat built up I doubt it at the X5 level. Most sats have built in safeguards and shut down major components during a radiation storm. They have ample warning with Soho and Lasco sats warning us.
If I have have math right that they use IE “enough power to to heat every home in NY for 2 years” ,That is less than 0.5% of the total use of power by the population on the planet over the same two years.
The Swiss got a vote. The people of the US will not.
That’s because they (Swiss) have referendums, which Millennials better introduce here to control what Congress does.
I was over there in Basel on business a few months ago, right about the time they had the referendum on spending money to work on population control in developing countries. It didn’t pass, but at least they’re addressing the issue as opposed to the brainless numb nuts who come on here spouting their AGW crap as if there’s no consequences and no downside to telling hordes of poor people that we want to murder them because we are their planet-saving betters. Eh, Brandon Warren, what say you ??.
🎵🎵 Oh Happy Day. 🎵🎵 Oh Happy Daaay. 🎵🎵When Jesus walked . . . .
Hey, they just want to prevent those glaciers from advancing like they did in the Little Ice Age.
My personal respect for Switzerland is now up 22 points.
Refreshing my memory a bit about energy sources in Switzerland, it appears that their domestic sources of energy have always been rather green, as they are heavy on hydroelectric (all that beautiful snow melt) and nuclear (green only to some). Purchased energy from outside of Switzerland is either nuclear or more of the naughty carbon variety. So who exactly were they going to tax, and how? Looks like it would have been a tax on imported carbon based energy, which would just make their energy more expensive. Perhaps they are looking at their neighbors the Germans and realizing that they don’t want to emulate them and the negative impacts on their industries. The Swiss tend to be VERY pragmatic, and this seems to be further evidence of that fact.
Is that a consensus?
Regardless, Switzerland already has a Carbon Tax…
http://www.renewablesinternational.net/switzerland-raises-carbon-tax-by-two-thirds/150/537/71519/
Yes, but a rather small one, lets say in a more symbolically fashion. The now defeated initiative of the Swiss Green Liberals would have been a really brutal levy on all fossil fuels!
OK, so I’ve finally made it to the bottom of the current comments… Coming in on the pragmatic note of the previous commenter.
Before drawing all sorts of sweeping conclusions about this topic, however hilarious some of them might be, there are some things to get straight(er), that I can try to help with, having voted in that election and followed it a bit (and living in Switzerland):
– The “Green Liberal Party” is a right wing version of a green party, which is far more recent and slightly less popular (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partis_politiques_suisses) that the original and still present green party. It’s the latter which is more similar to what you’d see in other countries, and wanted to present a counter-proposal to the initiative that was more in line with the government. The Green LIberal party has been accused of being a “fake green” or “greenwashed” party.
– Many popular votes in Switzerland fail because of perceived poor details, implementability or clarity, rather than people being against it in principle. This was clearly at least partly true here, as it would have imposed a baffling system with many questions left unanswered. E.g. 7% VAT (that represents, if I recall properly, around 40% of government revenue) would have been removed and to balance the budget, the commonly-repeated estimate was that, for exemple, gasoline would have immediately reached 5 francs (CHF,=USD) per litre (or a bit under 20$ per gallon for the non-metric). Someone else here mentioned the other big question: what happens when consumption of fossil fuels went down as a reaction? Revenue would fall or the tax would have to increase. Thus there were probably too many unknowns, potential pitfall and large, rapid changes for many to stomach. Hence the thrashing. Often laws based on good principles will get retooled, even several times, and finally get voted in. Something this extreme may have been counterproductive to even green causes, however (my opinion).
– As spaatch mentioned just above, Switzerland does have a carbon tax, on fossil fuels (http://www.bafu.admin.ch/co2-abgabe/12357/index.html?lang=fr), though it’s not big, at about 60 CHF/USD per ton of CO2, and, oddly, companies can get exemptions if they consume a lot of them…
Overall, I don’t think there are many conclusions to draw from this vote. I see it as a blip on the radar, similar to other crazily ridiculous things we vote on periodically. Though some of the bad ones of those pass, too, sadly…
It was a good old-fashioned butt-kicking, and could have scarcely happened to more deserving folk. We’ll have to update our list of Chuck Norris superlatives to include this somehow.
The Koch brothers bought off 92% of the Swiss voters.
Well that’s what I heard somewhere. /s
Although I am not greatly in favor of a carbon tax, I see a reason why the election went the way it did. The proposal was to use a tax on non-renewable energy to replace the usual European value-added tax, which would be completely ditched. I see why voters in a European country would overwhelmingly vote against completely ditching the nowadays-traditional European main means of taxation.
Carbon Tax = Carbon Currency for banksters. Nothing more, nothing less.
Green Fiasco: 92% Of Swiss Voters Reject Carbon Tax In Referendum
And now you know , if you did not already . when the greens try to get such idea imposed without the public having a say so. Their view of democracy has always been that its good idea once everyone agrees with them , until they people should be told what to do ‘for the shake of the planet ‘
I think I’ll move to Switzerland.
Switzerland in cold Phaedo, and will get colder if the sun’s orbit throws us into another ice age or mini ice age. Nice place though to ski.
Congrats to the Swiss. Unfortunately, here in Ontario, the provincial government is planning to introduce a new tax – to save the children, of course. They are deciding whether it will be a “Carbon” tax (I personally do not want the price of pencils to rise) or a Cap and Trade extravaganza.
Questions are: How much colder will this make Ontario and how much damage will it do to the economy. Also, where are the
thievesLiberals going to stash the loot?