Van Rompuy wants the EU to run on CO2

November 25, 2009 by Infowars Ireland

Herman Van Rompuy, the EU's new President, may not be well-known, but he knows exactly what he's up to...

www.telegraph.co.uk

Carbon taxes will provide the EU with its own revenue steram. That’s the dream of the new EU President, says Christopher Booker

No doubt as we contemplate the figure who has rocketed from obscurity to became “the President of Europe”, we have all made silly little jokes about “Mr Rumpy”. After the eight tortuous years it has taken to get the “Constitution for Europe” into place, with all the talk of how vital it was for the EU to have a figurehead to represent Europe on the world stage as the equivalent of the President of the United States, some may now think of the poet Horace’s famous line, parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus (“the mountains are in labour, and will give birth to a ridiculous mouse”).

But it would be wrong to underestimate Herman Van Rompuy, the first permament president of the European Council. This Belgian economist is a clever and ruthless political operator. Once, to win a political battle, he changed the locks to prevent his opponents entering a crucial meeting. (For details of his character, see the Brussels Journal blog by one of his former colleagues, Paul Belien.) And the reason why he was very much the preferred candidate of the European Commission is that the one thing for which President Van Rompuy can be relied on is a determination to use all his crafty skills to further the power of our new government in Brussels.

At the heart of the “European project”, there has always been one core goal in all it does – to absorb ever more of the powers of national governments into the centre. And almost the only thing we know about Mr Van Rompuy’s ambitions in his new office is that he wants “more Europe”.

Much of his wish list may have been drearily familiar ever since the Addenino report of 1985: more flying of the “ring of stars” flag, more singing of the “European anthem”, EU number plates on cars, EU identity cards. But the one thing the EU has needed to make its powers complete, and which not even its Constitution could give, was the power to levy its own direct taxes. It is no accident that this is now at the top of Mr Van Rompouy’s list – nor that the way in which he plans to raise those taxes is by levying new charges on every kind of activity that emits CO2. Read more…