By Jo Nova
Good news — there is one less hyper-complex, pointless, car-hate program in the world
It all flipped so quickly: Only six months ago President Macron was hurling France into a climate changing roadmap of the Octopus kind. The people of France were going to have to buy EVs, work from home, swap the filet mignon for tofu, and take fewer flights overseas. Even large screen televisions were going to have to shrink, to save electrons. And some bureaucrats were enthusiastically even dreaming that they would reach into homes and set the thermostats to max out at 19C (66F) in winter and to only cool to 25C (78F) in summer.
To beat French car owners around the head, the National government legislated car zoning incentives to make life hard for anyone who wanted to drive an old car. The low emission zones started in 2019 and had already spread like a municipal leprosy to every town larger than 150,000 people.
In these ZFEs (zones à faibles émissions), cars were ranked and given a sticker. Crit’Air 0 were the cleanest and Crit’Air 5 were the most “polluting” vehicles. Different rules applied to each sticker class in each town with a soul sapping complexity. In Paris for example, Crit’Air 3 cars (basically diesel cars older than 2011, and petrol cars before 2006) were banned on weekdays. Fines varied from €68 to €750. It was a case of — if you like your car, you can keep it — (locked in the garage, right?)
But cars older than 1997 were seen as such baby killers they were not allowed to have a Crit’Air Sticker at all, so their drivers would be fined if they were caught on any weekday between 8am and 8pm. Obviously, the bans hurt the poor and the rural workers — who drove older cars. They also hurt the tradies, and small businesses that used a van.
The low emission zones were so unpopular, as the BBC even admits, they “turned into something of a lightning rod for Macron’s supporters”. (The wonder is that it took five years?)
Last week the French National Assembly voted 98 to 51 to scrap the zones entirely. The government had tried to dilute the rules, and save the restrictions to Paris and Lyon, but MP’s were having none of it. Evidently, many politicians were afraid of word getting back to voters that they didn’t vote down the low emissions zones. (Go, democracy).
Interestingly, these car zones were so awful that even some members on the far left of French politics, joined the centre right to get rid of them.
Finally, there are hints of life on the far left:
“Green policies should not be imposed on the backs of the working classes” — Clémence Guetté.
Guetté is described in the Wall Street Journal as being “to the left of Bernie Sanders”. The Greens and Socialists though, still voted for the car sticker program to change the weather. They probably like having stickers on their cars to tell everyone how smugly clever they are.
French MPs vote to scrap low-emission zones
BBC
A handful of MPs from Macron’s party joined opposition parties from the right and far right in voting 98-51 to scrap the zones, which have gradually been extended across French cities since 2019.
But it was a personal victory for writer Alexandre Jardin who set up a movement called Les #Gueux (Beggars), arguing that “ecology has turned into a sport for the rich”.
The low-emission zones began with 15 of France’s most polluted cities in 2019 and by the start of this year had been extended to every urban area with a population of more than 150,000, with a ban on cars registered before 1997.
Marine Le Pen condemned the ZFEs as “no-rights zones” during her presidential campaign for National Rally in 2022, and her Communist counterpart warned of a “social bomb”.
The head of the right-wing Republicans in the Assembly, Laurent Wauquiez, talked of “freeing the French from stifling, punitive ecology”, and on the far left, Clémence Guetté said green policies should not be imposed “on the backs of the working classes”.
Green Senator Anne Souyris told BFMTV that “killing [the ZFEs] also means killing hundreds of thousands of people” …
The legislation still has to go through the upper house, though it is expected to. And it doesn’t stop tyrant-municipalities from imposing their own small tourist-deterrent zones. But spread the word in case any of our politicians think this idea is not radioactively awful. They need to know it’s been tried and failed so we don’t have to repeat the experiment.
See also France, Yes Even France, Rethinks Low-Emissions Zones, Wall Street Journal
Car and signs picture created with AI.