Macron's feeble free-market climate fix
By Mark Ballard
7 December 2018
There has been talk that the troubles over France’s fuel tax these last few weeks were not a protest but the start of an insurrection. France’s President Emmanuel Macron had reckoned on averting ecological peril by tinkering with the market, with a bit of elbow economics. Taxes would discourage driving. Severe taxes would stress how much was at stake. But the combined crisis of common hardship and ecological collapse is so momentous that it will require greater imagination and ambition, and perhaps a greater degree of government intervention than a mere tax.
The papers reported lives of hardship in rural France, where common wages didn’t stretch the week, let alone the holidays. Leave it to market forces, as Macron’s philosophical position would appear to have it, and wealthy people will sell their cars and buy electric ones. The poor meanwhile will just sell their cars, unable to afford to run them. In rural France, in fact, they have been abandoning them to the arsonists. In a generation the trend would have trickled down, though not as quickly as civilisation’s odds.
Yet the idea is that the world’s problems are so complex and changeable that sensible solutions cannot be dictated. And that human dignity and free will are so precious, and human ingenuity so effective, and so beautiful, that people should not be told. So let people play free, it goes. Don't discourage them from fulfilling their lives heartily, by taxing the wealth that comes from good living and good fortune. Tax what’s bad. Let people enjoy.
Macron would avert crisis as the conductor of a free jazz carnival parade, leaving everyone to make their own tune, so from the chaos will emerge such a beautiful cacophony of keys and melodies as could not be described on musical paper. Tinker with road signs, to send the carnival down a path, then leave it on its way.
This almost entirely worked with the 5p tax on plastic bags in the UK. It almost entirely worked with stiff subsidies for offshore wind, after two decades. It might work with the UK's latest, relatively meagre incentive for businesses to innovate solutions to the problem of plastic waste. And what wonders of invention might incentive create if the government would only commit enough of it. The Newport Tidal Lagoon Power project would surely have inspired us all to abandon our cars if the government had simply put up the money.
Ecological figurehead David Attenborough has meanwhile declared before the UN that the ecological crisis is so severe that, if we don't take action, “the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon”.
Yet the £1bn-a-year the UK puts up for wind farms was covered by increases in household bills. The tax to pay for government incentive has got to come from somewhere. Macron seems to have made big decisions. He will have shut down all coal power plants in two years. That’s the sort of business Attenborough means. In Northern France though, outlets of the posh chocolatier that is the family business of Macron's wife Jean Trogneux were spat on and abused in the recent protests. You don’t know what hardship’s like, the sputum said; pile the burdens on people with shoulders big enough to take it; we want to eat cake too but we can't afford it.
The pampered people of France have grown so used to generous social payouts that they don't think it fair that the weather has turned against them, and that the time has come for them to knuckle down, to muck in and make the best of what there is. France has been so generous that double-digit unemployment is the norm. It has been so easy that the high-wage unemployed have been known to swan off for the high life abroad for years at a time, living off regular social payments and spouting off about fine art, superior food and liberty. Still, the hardships of the working poor are real.
In the US at least, they have been saying this is not a crisis of government but of capitalism. They ask what happened to the philanthropic spirit of post-war capitalists: the generous common wage, the insignificant degree of income inequality, the public-spirit. The world is supposedly awash with private finance. It is easy to get investment at low rates. There is presumably enough private money for lagoons aplenty, and to solve the problem of plastic and of fossil fuels. You would think it not fair until you saw the immense amount of investment, entrepreneurialism, and big industry that has taken to the problem of electric power, all around the world. The problem isn’t solved. It is being solved. With public spirit, it will be solved.
< Originally published in Engineering & Technology >