Macron's top-down approach to fighting climate change serves as a cautionary tale

[brooklynite]

CNN:

While world leaders gather in Katowice, Poland, for the COP24 climate summit, protesters in the streets of Paris have successfully forced French President Emmanuel Macron's hand, undercutting his efforts to impose a carbon tax on French energy sales. Macron has made climate change and lowering greenhouse gases a central component of both his domestic and foreign policies, only to face dramatic failure at the hands of his "yellow vest" countrymen.

Macron's popularity has been low in France for months, and has now fallen to just a 23% approval rating. But the rioting across his country sends a frightening signal to politically powerful advocates seeking to save the planet from its predicted catastrophic 2 degree Celsius average temperature increase by midcentury.

With the Trump administration having pulled out of the Paris COP21 agreement -- which is the foundation of the current Katowice talks -- and Macron paying such a significant price for his efforts, leaders of all political stripes must wonder how to effectively tackle climate change without facing uprisings, dissent and stock market downturns.

The short answer: Do not follow Macron's example. In imposing this tax, Macron took a top-down approach, not consulting the very people who would be most adversely affected by it: his fellow countrymen. He listened to economists and top French business leaders who, correctly, named taxation as one way to drive down fossil fuel use and decrease France's carbon footprint.

(nb - the author is a close friend of mine)

[Loki Liesmith]

1. Article does not provide any way forward

I’m going to have to assume there is none at this point.

[The_jackalope]

3. There is none.

Neither top-down nor bottom-up approaches are acceptable to people. Both are seen as costing jobs or economic opportunity.
People instinctively realize that attacking climate change rapidly will require shrinking the world economy.

[hatrack]

4. After all, the pain inflicted by a destabilized climate is NOTHING compared to the pain of a gas tax

Or, as someone else noted, "It has become easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism."

[The_jackalope]

6. The tool monkey's risk-assessment circuitry is very poorly designed.

That's why monkey traps work.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/monkey_trap

[hatrack]

7. No matter how loud the screaming, no matter the quantity of feces hurled?

[The_jackalope]

8. To Mother Nature, feces are just fertilizer.

[Doodley]

2. He did the right thing.

[suffragette]

5. Makes an interesting companion piece to Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez's tweets about CEOs presentations

to new Congress members, while, for example, labor leaders, apparently weren’t included.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100211519597


More from the CNN opinion piece you posted:
As exhausting and daunting as it may be, climate leaders must pay heed to the cries of France's yellow vests, and the angry masses inside their own nations. A corporate boardroom or gathering of CEOs may be more comfortable. But curing the world's climate catastrophe, pulling humanity from its existential brink, requires nothing less than solutions found, and supported, across whole societies.