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Blockades of 17 November 2018
The Occitan Nation Party understands the anger of French road users and leaders of the protest movement that will go as far as blockading roads and motorways, announced for Saturday, 17 November.
However, it will not associate itself with the yellow vest citizen movement but notes that a number of its members and sympathizers are planning to take part in it while it understands the reservations several others may have.
Admittedly, the French government is trying to justify the significant increases in fuel taxes by the need to finance the energy transition that is indispensable to meet the challenge of global warming.
In reality, tax money is not earmarked forenrgy transition but it disappears into the bottomless hole of a state that chooses to finance other highly questionable expenditure.
Much more than metropolitan areas,these taxes affect medium-sized and small towns and rural so-called « peripheral » territories, many in Occitania, where people need their cars to go to work.
While it is true that petrol or diesel cars contribute to pollution, the much greater impact on global warming of road transport by truck, at the expense of piggyback transport, and maritime and air transport is rarely mentioned.
The government claims to mitigate what must be called punitive taxation by providing financial assistance for the purchase of electric vehicles whose manufacture is not environmentally friendly and which are far too expensive for many motorists.
Nor is there ever any question of the increase in electricity consumption that the proliferation of electric vehicles will inevitably generate in a country that is still dependent on nuclear power for 70% of its electricity needs and whose renewable energy production remains low.
Neither is the use of hydrogen as a fuel that will have to be produced a panacea.
The government seeks to solve the problem downstream through financial assistance when, to be fair and effective, solutions should be implemented upstream.
The unbridled need for oil, whose prices are rising for geopolitical reasons and which is entirely imported, is explained by:
- On the one hand, French-style centralism, which concentrates economic activity and political power in the Paris region and metropolitan areas, leading to an increased need for mobility for workers and inhabitants in general as a result of the disappearance of local services,
On the other hand, financial capitalism and its offshoring of activities, which result in an increase in the most polluting means of transport.
The Occitan Nation Party believes that calling for the cancellation of the fuel tax increases is only a short-term solution and is not up to the challenge.
The Occitan Nation Party is proposing a major territorial redevelopment aimed at relocating production, consumption, public services and decision-making to effectively support the energy transition.
This implies a reorganization of the overlapping administrative layers.
It will pass through real regions with a historical and cultural identity (notably linguistic) and real economic, fiscal and political powers instead of the technocratic monsters resulting from territorial reform.
It will also require curbing metropolization.
The Occitan Nation Party, without calling into question inter-municipality, is in favour of maintaining the small municipalities that constitute the local democratic fabric.
to which citizens are rightly attached.
14/11/2018
Blockades of 17 November 2018