France’s Constitutional Council has apparently annulled the carbon tax that President Sarkozy had hoped to shepherd through to allow some trademark Gallic peacocking about their “world leadership” on the issue. It was a bit tricky — more of a gesture to be waved about — because France gets more than three-fourths of its electricity from nuclear power, and because the tax was riddled with exemptions — for electricity production, refineries, coke plants, chemical plants, and a host of other industries, so that, all told, 93 percent of industrial emissions were exempted — making it not worth not much more than the papier it was written on.
And that’s why the arbiters of liberté, égalité, et fraternité put the kibosh on it. (You can read a translation of the Constitutional Council’s press release here.)
It’s pretty funny, actually. But it’s what happens when you start down this path. You either politically allocate the ration coupons — like in the Waxman-Markey bill — or you carve out exemptions from the tax, also for politically connected.
That’s what killed Gore’s BTU tax in 1993 — it didn’t die because Congress decided to do the right thing, it was swiss-cheesed with exemptions that finally made it not worth the candle of voting for an energy tax with hardly any revenue. The same phenomenon has played a role in halting their backdoor BTU/carbon tax — cap-and-trade. The role that such favoritism played was smaller this time: The U.S. Chamber did stand strong for a while — but more importantly, this time the public got wind of what was up and made it too uncomfortable for their elected representatives to try and drag this energy tax avec corporate welfare over the finish line.