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 […]