French Revolution! Carbon tax ruled unconstitutional just two days before taking effect
December 30, 2009
What is it they say? The best plans of mice and men. Hopefully the same thing will happen over here in the US if the Democrats vote in Cap & Trade later in 2010.
French Revolution! Carbon tax ruled unconstitutional just two days before taking effect
This new French carbon tax was scheduled to go into law on Jan1, 2010. The tax was steep: 17 euros per ton of carbon dioxide (USD $24.40). In a stunning move, and surely a blow to warmists everywhere, the tax has been found unconstitutional and thrown out. Originally found here (Google Translation).
Lord Monckton was kind enough to assist me in deciphering the meaning of the ruling and writes:
In France, if at least 60 Deputies of the House and 60 Senators appeal to the Constitutional Council, it has the power to pronounce on the constitutionality of a proposed law – in the present case, the 2010 national budget of France, which contained enabling provisions (loi deferee) for a carbon levy. The Council found that these enabling provisions were unconstitutional on two grounds: that the exemptions contained within the provisions for a carbon levy vitiated the primary declared purpose of the levy, to combat carbon emissions and hence “global warming”; and that the exemptions would cause the levy to fall disproportionately on gasoline and heating oils and not on other carbon emissions, thereby breaching the principle that taxation should be evenly and fairly borne.
The Press release from the French Constitutional Council is here in English (Google Translated) and in original French
Here’s a Deustch-Welle news article on the reversal.
France’s Constitutional Council says the country’s proposed carbon tax is illegal. This is a severe blow to French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s plans to fight climate change.
France’s Constitutional Council has struck down a carbon tax that was planned to take effect on January 1st. The council, which ensures the constitutionality of French legislation, said too many polluters were exempted in the measure and the tax burden was not fairly distributed.
It was estimated that 93 percent of industrial emissions outside of fuel use, including the emissions of more than 1,000 of France’s top polluting industrial sites, would be exempt from the tax, which would have charged 17 euros per ton of emitted carbon dioxide.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has argued the tax is necessary to combat climate change and reduce the country’s dependence on oil.
However, the council’s ruling is a severe blow to both Sarkozy’s environmental plan as well as France’s budget for 2010. The government now has to find a way to come up with about 4.1 billion euros in revenue that was expected from the tax.
Crap, That Was Inconvienient!
December 15, 2009
Hahahaha…don’t ya love it. When stupidity unraveled…
Inconvenient truth for Al Gore as his North Pole sums don’t add up

Al Gore’s office admitted that the percentage he quoted in his speech was from an old, ballpark figure.
Richard Lindzen, a climate scientist at the Massachusets Institute of Technology who does not believe that global warming is largely caused by man, said: “He’s just extrapolated from 2007, when there was a big retreat, and got zero.”
The Goracle Has Spoken!
December 9, 2009
Climategate: Gore falsifies the record
Andrew Bolt
Wednesday, December 09, 2009 at 06:54pm
Al Gore has studied the Climategate emails with his typically rigorous eye and dismissed them as mere piffle:
Q: How damaging to your argument was the disclosure of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University?
A: To paraphrase Shakespeare, it’s sound and fury signifying nothing. I haven’t read all the e-mails, but the most recent one is more than 10 years old. These private exchanges between these scientists do not in any way cause any question about the scientific consensus.
And in case you think that was a mere slip of the tongue:
Q: There is a sense in these e-mails, though, that data was hidden and hoarded, which is the opposite of the case you make [in your book] about having an open and fair debate.
A: I think it’s been taken wildly out of context. The discussion you’re referring to was about two papers that two of these scientists felt shouldn’t be accepted as part of the IPCC report. Both of them, in fact, were included, referenced, and discussed. So an e-mail exchange more than 10 years ago including somebody’s opinion that a particular study isn’t any good is one thing, but the fact that the study ended up being included and discussed anyway is a more powerful comment on what the result of the scientific process really is.
In fact, thrice denied:
These people are examining what they can or should do to deal with the P.R. dimensions of this, but where the scientific consensus is concerned, it’s completely unchanged. What we’re seeing is a set of changes worldwide that just make this discussion over 10-year-old e-mails kind of silly.
In fact, as Watts Up With That shows, one Climategate email was from just two months ago. The most recent was sent on November 12 – just a month ago. The emails which have Tom Wigley seeming (to me) to choke on the deceit are all from this year. Phil Jones’ infamous email urging other Climategate scientists to delete emails is from last year.
How closely did Gore read these emails? Did he actually read any at all? Was he lying or just terribly mistaken? What else has he got wrong?
Al Gore – Give Back The Oscar!
December 4, 2009
From the LA Times…can you believe it?
Take back Al Gore’s Oscar, 2 Academy members demand in light of Climategate
December 4, 2009 | 2:03 am
No, it wouldn’t do anything for the environment.But two Hollywood conservatives (yes, there are some) have called upon the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to rescind the prestigious, profitable gold Oscar statuette that it gave ex-Vice President Al Gore two years ago for the environmental movie “An Inconvenient Truth.”
Roger L. Simon and Lionel Chetwynd, both Academy members, are among a small, meandering pack of known political conservatives still believed to be on the loose in the liberal bastion of movie-making.
In 2007, Hollywood’s Academy sanctified Gore’s cinematic message of global warming with its famous statue, enriched his earnings by $100,000 per 85-minute appearance and helped elevate the Tennesseean’s profile to win the Nobel Peace Prize despite losing the election battle of 2000 to a Texan and living in a large house with lots of energy-driven appliances.
Chetwynd and Simon were prompted to make their hopeless demand this week by the….
…leak two weeks ago of a blizzard of British academic e-mails purporting to show that scientists at the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit systematically falsified data to document the appearance of global warming in recent years.
The university is reportedly investigating the claims, which added dry fuel to the never-ending political debate over whether the Earth really is warming as a result of human activity or if it’s just normal natural cycles and the debate is what’s heated. The demand to withdraw Gore’s award provides yet another opportunity to argue.
The startling leak comes at an inconvenient time just before next week’s United Nations’ climate change meeting that will cause an immense carbon footprint with thousands of people flying up or over to Denmark to talk about saving the environment.
These airplanes will include Air Force One with its primary passenger President Obama, who’s returning to the Copenhagen scene where he didn’t help win the 2016 Summer Olympics for Chicago, which could do with a little global warming at this time of year.
Simon, a screenwriter who is also chief executive officer of Pajamas Media, a network of conservative online blogs, conceded he knew of no precedent for the Academy withdrawing a previously-awarded Oscar, despite decades of Hollywood hijinks and worse. But, he added, “I think they should rescind this one.”
The controversial leaked documents have been assembled here by Pajamas Media and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The joint demand by Simon and filmmaker Chetwynd is available on video here.
The television news-watching world in America has not learned much about the so-called Climategate scandal because it has not really been mentioned on the air except for a notorious cable news channel named for a three-lettered, wily, wild animal that often seems to revel in debunking liberal shibbeloths.
Network news programs have been far more concerned with the obviously more important White House party-crasher story involving a couple of formally-dressed phonies.
The falsified documents do not come up in Gore interview excerpts published late last night here by Politico’s John F. Harris and Mike Allen.
This week White House Press Secy. Robert Gibbs claimed that global warming was no longer in dispute by most people. But a subsequent Rasmussen Reports poll of Americans finds only one in four adults believe most scientists agree on the topic.
And while only 20% claim to have followed the leaked e-mail story Very Closely, nearly 60% believe it is at least somewhat likely that scientists have falsified environmental data to support their own global warming beliefs and theories.
– Andrew Malcolm
“How many scientists does it take to establish that a consensus does not exist on global warming?” Is 32,000 enough?
The Petition reads:
We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth. YOU CAN READ THE SUPPRESSED EMAILS & COMMENTS HERE:
Global Warming Consensus Gone Up in Flames
The UN global warming conference currently underway in Poland is about to face a serious challenge from over 650 dissenting scientists from around the globe who are criticizing the climate claims made by the UN IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore. Set for release this week, a newly updated U.S. Senate Minority Report features the dissenting voices of over 650 international scientists, many current and former UN IPCC scientists, who have now turned against the UN. The report has added about 250 scientists (and growing) in 2008 to the over 400 scientists who spoke out in 2007. The over 650 dissenting scientists are more than 12 times the number of UN scientists (52) who authored the media hyped IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers.
Norway’s Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the “new religion.” A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton’s Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists’ open letter.)
The collapse of the “consensus” has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth’s temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.
EPA May Have Suppressed Report Skeptical Of Global Warming
The Environmental Protection Agency may have suppressed an internal report that was skeptical of claims about global warming, including whether carbon dioxide must be strictly regulated by the federal government, according to a series of newly disclosed e-mail messages.
Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty “decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.”
The EPA official, Al McGartland, said in an e-mail message to a staff researcher on March 17: “The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward… and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.”
The e-mail correspondence raises questions about political interference in what was supposed to be a independent review process inside a federal agency — and echoes criticisms of the EPA under the Bush administration, which was accused of suppressing a pro-climate change document.
Alan Carlin, the primary author of the 98-page EPA report, told CBSNews.com in a telephone interview on Friday that his boss, McGartland, was being pressured himself. “It was his view that he either lost his job or he got me working on something else,” Carlin said. “That was obviously coming from higher levels.”
E-mail messages released this week show that Carlin was ordered not to “have any direct communication” with anyone outside his small group at EPA on the topic of climate change, and was informed that his report would not be shared with the agency group working on the topic.
“I was told for probably the first time in I don’t know how many years exactly what I was to work on,” said Carlin, a 38-year veteran of the EPA. “And it was not to work on climate change.” One e-mail orders him to update a grants database instead.
Carlin’s report listed a number of recent developments he said the EPA did not consider, including that global temperatures have declined for 11 years; that new research predicts Atlantic hurricanes will be unaffected; that there’s “little evidence” that Greenland is shedding ice at expected levels; and that solar radiation has the largest single effect on the earth’s temperature.
In the last few days, Republicans have begun to raise questions about the report and e-mail messages, but it was insufficient to derail the so-called cap and trade bill from being approved by the U.S. House of Representatives.
The revelations could prove embarrassing to Jackson, the EPA administrator, who said in January: “I will ensure EPA’s efforts to address the environmental crises of today are rooted in three fundamental values: science-based policies and programs, adherence to the rule of law, and overwhelming transparency.” Similarly, Mr. Obama claimed that “the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over… To undermine scientific integrity is to undermine our democracy. It is contrary to our way of life.”
“All this talk from the president and (EPA administrator) Lisa Jackson about integrity, transparency, and increased EPA protection for whistleblowers — you’ve got a bouquet of ironies here,” said Kazman, the CEI attorney.
Obama’s New New Global Warming Treaty Would Impose Stricter Rules on U.S. Than on China or Saudi Arabia
June 4, 2009
More fair and balanced treatment from our great United Nations.
In an interesting turn of events during the debate, Congressman Steve Scalise (R-LA) issued a warning saying, “we’re setting up a global warming Gestapo.” The comment was made in reference to Section 201 of the act which establishes a national building code. Under that code, the Secretary of Energy would have the power to assess civil penalties for buildings that do not meet the new code.
Scalise described a situation where a home that was destroyed by a natural disaster was rebuilt but with superior material than were dictated by the new national building code. According to Scalise, the homeowner would be in violation of federal law, even if the material exceeded the federal standard.
Now living in your home is considered unlawful under this bill.
~ Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA)
“The federal government can come in and inspect your house and send you the bill. And if they find that you’re out of compliance with this new federal code, ‘The Secretary shall assess a civil penalty for violations of this section,’” Scalise said. ”Now living in your home is considered unlawful under this bill. This is ludicrous.”
Taking his argument a step further, Scalise called into question the very constitutionality of the measure. He reminded his fellow congressmen that the 10th Amendment to the Constitution says, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to states respectively or to the people.”
This bill comes in and basically says throw out the 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
~ Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA)
By creating its own enforcement measures and own building code that will usurp those which states have already established, the act stands to violate the Constitution. Scalise said, “This bill comes in and basically says throw out the 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and the federal government’s gonna throw out your building code.”
Obama Administration Proposes Text for New Global Warming Treaty That Would Impose Stricter Rules on U.S. Than on China or Saudi Arabia

UNFCC logo
The text, obtained by CNSNews.com, was submitted in early May to the Secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which is developing a new international global warming treaty that is expected to be finalized at an international conference to be held in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December.
The treaty will reduce carbon emissions from the U.S. and other “developed” countries while allowing ”developing” countries–which include the world’s largest polluter, China, and oil-rich nations such as Saudi Arabia–to avoid equal restrictions.
Under the UNFCCC, only 40 of the world’s nations are considered developed countries, while the remainder are considered developing countries. The “developing” countries include not only the Communist People’s Republic of China and Saudi Arabia, but also other oil-rich states in the Persian Gulf, including the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Iran. Oil-rich Venezuela is also considered a developing nation.
Specifically, developed countries are expected to meet higher standards than developing countries.
“With respect to developing country Parties whose national circumstances reflect greater responsibility or capability,” says the draft, “… Each such Party shall formulate and submit a low-carbon strategy for long-term net emissions reductions by 2050, consistent with the levels of ambition needed to contribute to meeting the objective of the Convention.”
Another set of developing countries will only need to achieve whatever standard is deemed “consistent with their capacity.”
Darn, and I had cut down my ice cube use to save the Poles…
March 26, 2009
I was just getting used to seeing all the liberal, hardheaded, lying bunch of crap about global warming when the scientists again release one of those compelling arguments against the “sky is falling” ice pocket rhetoric. Just when I think the Goracle is going to put on those saintly robes and step up to lead, another one of those “unlearned and we shouldn’t believe” scientists publishes these comments:
HEAT OF THE MOMENT
Shocker: ‘Global warming’ simply no longer happening
Temperatures dropping, fewer hurricanes, arctic ice growing, polar bear population up
Posted: March 22, 2009
9:56 pm Eastern© 2009 WorldNetDaily
WASHINGTON – This may come as bad news for Al Gore.
The modest global warming trend has stopped – maybe even reversed itself.
And it’s not just the record low temperatures experienced in much of the world this winter.
For at least the last five years, global temperatures have been falling, according to tracking performed by Roy Spencer, the climatologist formerly of NASA.
“Global warming” was going to bring more and more horrific hurricanes, climate change scientists and the politicians who subscribed to their theories said. But since 2005, only one major hurricane has struck North America.
A new study by Florida State University researcher Ryan Maue shows worldwide cyclone activity – typhoons, as well as hurricanes – has reached at least a 30-year low.
Two more studies – one by the Leibniz Institute of Marine Science and the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology in Germany and another by the University of Wisconsin – predict a slowing, or even a reversal of warming, for at least the next 10 to 20 years.
The Arctic sea ice has grown more on a percentage basis this winter than it has since 1979.
The number of polar bears has risen 25 percent in the past decade. There are 15,000 of them in the Arctic now, where 10 years ago there were 12,000.
“The most recent global warming that began in 1977 is over, and the Earth has entered a new phase of global cooling,” says Don Easterbrook, professor of geology at Western Washington University in Bellingham, confidently. He maintains a switch in Pacific Ocean currents “assures about three decades of global cooling. New solar data showing unusual absence of sun spots and changes in the sun’s magnetic field suggest … the present episode of global cooling may be more severe than the cooling of 1945 to 1977.”
Climatologist Joe D’Aleo of the International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project, says new data “show that in five of the last seven decades since World War II, including this one, global temperatures have cooled while carbon dioxide has continued to rise.”
“The data suggest cooling not warming in Earth’s future,” he says.
Go Figure!
Steve




