Guest essay by Eric Worrall
NGOS including Oxfam and Greenpeace are furious at President Macron’s frantic retreat from yellow vest protests against higher fuel taxes.
1.7 million people have signed a petition in favor of suing France over climate-change inaction
By Annabelle Timsit in Paris
December 27, 2018More than 1.7 million people have signed a petition in favor of suing the French government, accusing it of inaction on climate change.
Four NGOs—Oxfam, Greenpeace, Notre Affaire à Tous, and Fondation pour la Nature et l’Homme—have initiated legal proceedings saying France has defaulted on its environmental obligations. The initial Dec.18 filing gives the government two months to formulate a response, after which the organizations can choose to move forward with their lawsuit (link in French) in administrative court.
…
Recently, Macron’s government tried to implement an increased carbon tax to limit fossil fuels used in cars. But the resulting backlash from a group of populist protesters known as “yellow vests” has led to billions of euros in damages, hundreds of arrests, and the deaths of at least four people (link in French).
Some within the government have said these kinds of demonstrations discourage political action on climate change. But Toussaint believes the movement for climate justice and the yellow vests’ demands are not mutually exclusive. “What they [yellow vests] want first and foremost is social justice and financial justice,” she told Quartz. “And there will be no social justice without action for the climate. Global warming feeds on inequalities and strengthens them. It strikes the most fragile first. It is destroying our economy and our territories. So, it can be a process that can be done in parallel.” She argues the carbon tax should be balanced out with social subsidies financed through a tax hike on large corporate greenhouse gas emitters.
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Read more: https://qz.com/1507841/petition-to-sue-france-over-climate-change-is-signed-by-1-7-million/
Personally I think the NGOs are being optimistic in assuming the yellow vests would have accepted a subsidy for carbon tax deal.
Carbon tax advocates seem to assume fossil fuel demand is elastic – higher taxes reduce demand, by encouraging people to choose less carbon intensive alternatives to personal road transport. But many of the yellow vest protestors are farmers and rural workers, they live in regions with poor public transport. Many of them have to transport large payloads of rural supplies to or from their farms.
The livelihoods of rural yellow vest protestors are utterly dependent on their inelastic access to affordable diesel. Our access to affordable food is utterly dependent on keeping costs down for rural workers.
Update (EW): Breitbart reports the European Union is also piling pressure on France, with a statement that Macron has “lost authority” after offering concessions to protesters.
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Civil War is inevitable.
Let Greenpeace and Oxfam pay the taxes, then! That should cool their jets!
I gave up on Oxfam about 50 years ago when it stopped doing famine relief and became a political lobby group looking after its own bosses.
I don’t understand how Oxfam can be involved in this, unless charity rules differ in France. Here, a charity cannot be a political campaigner. Unless of course they have two mirrored organizations like Greenpeace – but I don’t know of anything like that with Oxfam.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10888966/Oxfam-MPs-shocked-by-disgraceful-political-campaigning.html
Oxfam IMO are as bad as Greenpeace these days, they’ve been up to their necks in green political advocacy for a while..
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/05/22/oxfams-climate-warriors-declare-war-on-poor-people/
This is like drug cartel sues Trump due to the wall.
You’d think it was all just about the money!
That Greedpeace is up to its neck in this should surprise no one, but Oxfam is now clearly in politics and not concentrating on what it should be doing. Yet more evidence of how reckless and out of control NGOs have become. Democratic politics is being subverted by these extremist groups and politicians worldwide need to wake up and see the consequences of not enforcing proper control and accountability on the whole Gang of Four and other such increasingly anti-progress NGOs.
The clock is near midnight for proper democracy with these elitists in the political field.
Somebody should sue loathsome genocidal Greenpeace for their part in the slaughter of millions using the weapon Malaria. They were aided and abetted by the UN (WHO), WWF, Sierra Club and other corrupt NGOs.
Snowflakes against yellow shirts. The yellows have it!
Would that result in more yellow snow?
I don’t know French law, but there is a clear moral case for consistency in government.
If the government says something is necessary to prevent catastrophe, then it has a moral duty to do that thing. So the government either has to admit that man made CO2 is not a problem or it has to do something about it.
Eric
You might find this interesting courtesy of politico.eu. It shows the percentage of people in each country in the EU who are concerned about certain issues, including climate. Interesting reading
https://www.politico.eu/article/what-european-voters-worry-about-election-209-facts-figures/
Tonyb, “https://www.politico.eu/article/what-european-voters-worry-about-election-209-facts-figures/”
please differentiate between “people answering to polls”
and
“voters” driving SUVs and flying to holly day resorts or for shopping cities.
“NGOS including Oxfam and Greenpeace
are furious
at President Macron’s frantic retreat from yellow vest protests against higher fuel taxes.”
________________________________________________
gilets jaunes protests hijacked by worldwide travelling far left / far right violent activists:
https://www.google.com/search?q=yellow+vests+France+violence+aktivists+worldwide&oq=yellow+vests+France+violence+aktivists+worldwide&aqs=chrome.
( violent black clad “protesters” with ski masks mostly green / left activists / terrorists )
Do not take the “1.7 million people” at face value
https://mythesmanciesetmathematiques.wordpress.com/2018/12/26/petition-des-giletsjaunes-vs-petition-laffairedusiecle/
(in French)
The easy option for the French government who are being challenged by Greenpeace and Oxfam is to rule their charitable status is suspended, while the court action takes place.
That way the government are not subsidising the opposite side , in the action against them.
The loss of status would immediately prevent the organisations from receiving tax credits for all donations they receive, and would also cause the loss of charitable fiscal privileges.
Let us then see how determined the NGOs then are, in their desire to resist the will of the people.
Who made Greenpeace and Oxfam a world government? End their charitable status now.
Charities that get too big for their boots is getting more common.
The RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institution) in the UK, has become a bloated bureaucracy. The volunteer crews are mostly men, and it’s a dangerous job. The number of non-crew employees (all bureaucrats who’ve never done a dirty or dangerous job) has trebled in the last twenty years, and it’s not as if they need to raise much cash, as the amount they have been left in legacies is almost embarrassing, and they have quite a pile of investments. So there is now a small army of the usual snowflake diversity & safety consultants, and the crews find themselves the targets. Accusations of unauthroised launches, reprimands for coffee mugs with girlie pictures on them, sackings for ‘unacceptable behaviour’ a.k.a. blokes horsing around.
Worse, there are now pre-launch briefings and insistence on contingency plans, even just to launch the RIB to pick up a tourist on a lilo who can’t get back to shore.
Some crews have resigned from the RNLI and set up independent operations.
The RNLI had a singular mission, so it’s taken time for the standard PC diversity/inclusive/safe space disease to infect them, but it’s happened nonetheless.
Greenpeace and Oxfam on the other hand are fully assimilated into the green blob.
They’ve got the usual army of NGO/charity snowflakes, plus the swivel-eyed green ideology.
That’s a toxic mix.
I hope they get their fingers burned.
Perhaps Oxfam (The Oxford Committee for Famine Relief) should stick to their original remit, and stay out of the ‘climate change’ fiasco?
compare https://www.google.com/search?client=ms-android-samsung&ei=L_IlXK6jGIe6swG_pazADA&q=Hamburg+G20+green+activists+riots+&oq=Hamburg+G20+green+activists+riots+&gs_l=mobile-gws-wiz-serp.
I’d like to think the core reasons for Les Gilets Jaunes protests represents the beginning of the end of this nonsense, but experience of human nature teaches us that things that are both well established and wrong, have to become blatently untenable before enough ordinary people turn round and say ‘Bollocks to this’. Hope I live long enough to see the day…
WTF is “climate justice”?
NewSpeak apparently meaning more taxes.
Gang Green have their backs to the wall now, and have decided to try using the only weapon they think is available: the law. Yeah, good luck with that.
The French ‘yellow vests’ have climate alarmists really alarmed. The protesters represent a real threat to their rent-seeking, the end of the road for climate junkets to exotic locales on the public dime, and a loss of status and power (an elite bureaucrat’s authority). Which is why I have a conflicted but real rooting interest in the yellow vest movement, even though, in general, I’m not in favor of political discourse by blocking roads and burning cars, and have been appalled by French populist violence in many instances in the past.
The solution is, as always.
Tax someone else and give the money to me.
Leftists are so predictable.
Many might happily support this litigation once they see proof the organizations leading it are operating completely without the benefits of fossil fuels, plastics, energy sources or other benefits derived from fossil fuels. Let them lead by example and then we can take them semi-seriously. As long as they jet around the world with smart phones in their pockets and fois gras on their plates talking nonsense about sacrifice and social justice they are simply proving the hypocrisy of self-proclaimed virtue sold for money and power.
“She argues the carbon tax should be balanced out with social subsidies financed through a tax hike on large corporate greenhouse gas emitters.”
The quality of work in developing a strategy of what to do based on findings in the field of climate science are even worse than the quality of work in the field of climate science itself.
This proposal would likely lead to a large increase in CO2 emissions, as it would be very effective in shift production to China — where production can be performed using coal-based energy, and then shipped from China to Europe using diesel-based energy, on ships built in China using coal-based energy.