Emmanuel Macron won’t “Make our planet great again” like this.
A year after the French president answered Donald Trump’s “America First” rejection of the Paris climate accords with a slogan of his own, France is in chaos. Violent rioting on the streets of Paris following Macron’s botched attempt to introduce new green taxes has played directly into the hands of the American president by inadvertently setting back the effort to tackle rising global temperatures.
The unrest in France risks sending a message to politicians worldwide that taxing carbon means putting your political career at risk, especially after similar failed attempts in Australia contributed to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd being forced from office.
To be sure, Macron’s dilemma should offer a stark warning that green policies cannot be isolated from wider questions of inequality and social justice. But the risk is that the story from France offers the wrong lessons at a time when a debate is advancing across Europe about how to build a carbon neutral economy.
In the U.K. for example, politicians are discussing how we should price carbon after our departure from the European Union, especially if we also exit its scheme for trading carbon.
Any leader who is serious about addressing climate change must also be serious about getting permission from their electorate to do so.
With that in mind, it’s important to note: Macron’s policy didn’t fail because it taxed carbon. It failed because it was a bad, regressive policy that hit the poorest hardest.
The U.K.’s carbon tax, by contrast, has been relatively well targeted, and has been sensitively managed by successive governments to lessen the impact on households and industry. The U.K. approach has driven gigantic cuts in emissions, which has resulted in our national carbon footprint being reduced to its lowest level since the 1890s.
This has enabled ministers to press on with plans to lower emissions all the way to zero. Likewise, dozens of other countries have managed to successfully implement more progressive carbon taxes without any major public resistance.
Going green should offer all countries the chance to build new industries around cleaner technologies, create good well-paid jobs, and to offer a healthier and more hopeful future for young people. There are success stories everywhere that prove this, not least in the United States, where the solar industry already employs more people than its oil and gas sector combined.
Britain is phasing out coal use | Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images
If Macron had been paying attention, he would have noticed that the most effective climate policies are not about taxing the poor. To the contrary, they’re about investing in the green alternatives while legislating to stop the worst polluters from unnecessarily using outdated, dirty technologies.
Yes, carbon pricing has a role, but it is just one policy of many. California, for example, is mandating its world-leading auto sector to offer cleaner vehicles. Spain and Canada, like Britain, are phasing-out coal use. All around the world public investment is driving down the costs of clean power sources like offshore wind farms to record low levels to the point that increasingly green energy is often also the cheapest energy.
I have spent more than a decade campaigning for a more hawkish approach to the climate crisis, but I’d also be the first to argue it was right that Macron was forced back to the drawing board over his plan.
Any leader who is serious about addressing climate change must also be serious about getting permission from their electorate to do so.
Had Macron been listening to his people, he would have looked beyond the economic orthodoxy of a blunt fiscal instrument to tax externalities whatever their human cost, and opted for the plethora of more popular, more progressive, and ultimately more effective approaches to cutting pollution.
Joss Garman is the U.K. director of the European Climate Foundation and a former political director of Greenpeace.