celebrated<\/a> that \u201cthe advertising industry could regulate itself.\u201d<\/p>\nMorcant regrets that the convention did not demand that its 149 propositions be put to the French people in a referendum. Ultimately, the convention decided to let the government handle the proposals, which Macron promised last June would be presented \u201cunfiltered\u201d to parliament. For Morcant, herself politicized by her participation in the convention, a referendum would have been a way to inform people and engage the broader population in the serious questions posed by the environmental crisis. \u201cThere was a lost opportunity,\u201d she acknowledges.<\/p>\n
Morcant defends the CCC from those who view it as a pure government ploy. \u201cIt was an incredible adventure. It was transformative for each of us,\u201d Morcant affirms. \u201cThere was a true representativity of France and of the French people.\u201d She is likewise skeptical of critics who claimed that the CCC\u2019s proposals did not offer enough: \u201cMany people say that the 149 proposals are not the building blocks for a new society. But they are.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cl\u00e9ment S\u00e9n\u00e9chal, a climate campaigner and organizer at Greenpeace, is more guarded in his assessment of the CCC. He told Jacobin<\/em>, \u201cThere were no revolutionary propositions. The repertoire of climate policies is widely known. We know that it implies a rupture with the dominant ideology, but we nonetheless found ourselves with a series of rather detailed measures, endorsed by the Citizens’ Climate Convention, and that were not afraid to enter into confrontation with capital, and to pose constraints on capital, and that\u2019s something.\u201d<\/p>\nJudged on their own merits, the proposals of an engaged group of 150 randomly selected citizens reveal a society struggling to break from the myth of corporate self-government. To cite a few examples, the convention called for the return of the estate tax dropped by Macron in 2017, new taxes on financial derivatives and dividends, the freezing of airport construction projects, and moratoriums on the artificialization of land through the repurposing of abandoned lots. These proposals do not contain all of the answers, but they attest to the growing conviction that seriously reducing emissions requires direct state intervention, collectively determined regulations on consumption, and wealth redistribution.<\/p>\nOne commonsense proposal called for a de facto ban on most flights within France, through the closing of air routes so long as the same commute could be made in under four hours thanks to low-emissions alternatives such as train travel.<\/q><\/aside>\nIt would be wrong to call this a \u201cconsensus.\u201d The party system in France is such that these ideas have yet to seriously upset or alter the political balance of power. Nonetheless, the proposals of the CCC show that the demands that emerged in the aftermath of the Yellow Vests revolt are here to stay, despite Macron\u2019s attempt to bury and divert them through the climate and resilience law.<\/p>\n
One of the commonsense proposals of the CCC called for a de facto ban on most flights within France, through the closing of air routes so long as the same commute could be made in under four hours thanks to low-emissions alternatives such as train travel. An excessive infringement on the market and consumer freedom, critics replied; they successfully lowered the cutoff point in the law to 2.5 hours, vastly reducing the reach of this measure.<\/p>\n
But perhaps the best display of the myth that “where there’s a will, there’s a way\u201d is the speed with which it is abandoned by its own advocates. On April 6, as parliament was entering its fifth week debating the climate and resilience law, the French state increased to 30 percent its capital share in Air France, under serious financial strain thanks to the pandemic. The move had to be approved by the European Commission, which is also enforcing the privatization of the continent\u2019s rail network. The bailout was conditioned on accelerated corporate restructuring, which will see the firing of some 8,500 workers through 2022.<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n\n \n
\n \n\n\nThis post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In September 2018, Emmanuel Macron\u2019s government announced a tax hike on gasoline products \u2014 claiming this would drive the shift in consumer behavior needed to fulfill France\u2019s emissions-reduction commitments. Dismissing the complaints of his chronically discontented subjects, Macron suggested that tweaks such as these would guide individuals toward a more responsible and ecologically sustainable way [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4375,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135365"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4375"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135365"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135365\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":135366,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135365\/revisions\/135366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}