Exit polls on Sunday indicated that Swiss voters appear to have narrowly rejected a proposed “carbon dioxide law” that would have hiked fees and taxes on fuels that produce greenhouse gases.
The Alpine country has been experiencing an outsized impact from climate change.
Switzerland has faced a rise in temperatures that is twice as fast as the global average, the government says. Greenhouse gases — notably carbon dioxide — are seen as the primary culprit.
The proposal would have revised and strengthened an existing law that was aimed at reducing CO2 emissions by 2030.
It would have enacted new taxes on CO2-generating fuel and natural gas, as well as on airline tickets.
The proposal was rejected by 51 percent of the vote, Swiss public broadcaster SRF reported.
However, local media said not all votes had been counted and the final result was not expected before late Sunday or Monday.
The climate proposal was one of several measures that Swiss voters cast their ballots nationwide on Sunday.
Critics of the proposal called it ineffective since Switzerland’s carbon dioxide emissions amount to a mere 0.1 percent of the global tally.
h/t Rúnar O.
Read rest at Firstpost
The vote in Switzerland is typical of results when the people are able to vote directly on climate change action except it normally isn’t that close. This is why almost all action on climate change is implemented without direct vote approval.
From the article, “Critics of the proposal called it ineffective since Switzerland’s carbon dioxide emissions amount to a mere 0.1 percent of the global tally.” That is true, but the real motivation for measures that are supposed to fight climate change is to extract more money from the tax payers and consumers. This motivation has nothing to do with the world wide percentage of Switzerland’s carbon dioxide emissions.
The Swiss have sent a message to the Euro-Weenie Union and the rest of the world CO2 is needed and can not and should not be regulated
The Swiss Alps are expected to be ice-free by 2090.
Actually, what was said by the NY Times in 2019 was that many of the glaciers are expected to all but vanish from the Alps by 2090, but in the true spirit of untrue beat-ups, all sounds much better.
That is, of course, if one can beat up a beat up in what would effectively be a beat-up squared. The answer for the NYT would, no doubt, be a resounding affirmative squared. Or cubed, like and ice block.
For Switzerland, a ‘correct’ answer to this icy poll probably hangs on whether or not they have the right voting equipment and procedures to make full use of the final counting process…
Maybe Joe could advise the Swiss on how it’s done?
Glaciers started retreating about 1825 at the end of mini ice age when carbon dioxide levels were still at their preindustrial level. A number of years ago the many ski resorts in the Alps canceled plans to upgrade due to the predictions of so called climate researchers that the snow would be disappearing. They then had a few years of record snow fall and didn’t have upgraded facilities to accommodate the large influx of skiers.