The end result of this is that driving a lot and excessive heating and cooling of spaces are more of an expensive luxury. The problem is people see owning and driving a personal vehicle as something like a right instead of the extravagant over-the-top luxury it really is. And once someone gets used to something, they get really angry when something threatens to take it away, pretty much no matter what it is. That's one of the biggest pitfalls of human nature.
France just threw away a political year on a gas tax they had to roll back. The political fallout, in the form of the yellow vest conservative movement, may well delay further progressive climate reform by another election cycle at least. The fact that a gas tax makes logical sense does not matter, what matters is if it has real world efficacy.
If the climate reform you are passing is causing backlashes that nullify it, we just wasted precious time for no reason. It does not matter how much you think the voting public should just get over themselves.
As an example: There is broad public support for substantially increased rates in top marginal taxation and in capital gains. Raise the money there and use it to subsidize low-carbon or negative-carbon alternatives.
This also highlights that what works is contextual. To my knowledge there is very little opposition to the ongoing rollout of cap-n-trade in the EU. And of course, if you can pass carbon taxation schemes, they are fantastic since they simply pull the external costs into the price and let the market sort it out.
The yellow vests are not a conservative movement, they are a movement fed up with austerity politics and extra expenses placed on ordinary people, while the wealthiest get tax cuts.
Macron was attempting to make ordinary people pay for the extravagant resource use practiced by the wealthy and by industry.
That is why people riot, because they (rightly) perceive those policies as taking from the working class and giving to the elite.
Owning an economy car is not “extravagant over-the-top” in the least. Another problem is hardliners taking such extreme positions against reasonable everyday people.
In a global sense, it really is. So is eating at restaurants regularly, or even eating meat with every meal. We just don't realize it because we live in such rich countries, and everybody does that stuff here. Me included. But most people in the world can't afford to live that way and currently don't. Please note that I don't think these things are bad or immoral, just that they are expensive to produce and expensive to consume. The Earth's resources can only sustain a small fraction of its population living that way. They are extravagant luxuries, and we should be thankful we get to have them.
