Newsbrief: Climate: a weak France sacrificing its interests within a weak Europe

Climate: a weak France sacrificing its interests within a weak Europe

The fight against climate change is essential for our planet's future. This is the raison d'être of our association which, since 2005, has been committed to ensuring that this issue is recognized as essential and that energy and climate policies are based on technical and scientific realities rather than dreams, beliefs and dogmas.

Since the real success of COP 21 and the Paris Agreement, we know that international agreements that bring real progress are a matter of diplomacy and international leadership. We also know that the participation of China and the United States, the two largest greenhouse gas emitters on the planet, is essential. In this respect, we can only welcome the reactivation of the Washington-Beijing axis by the newly elected US President, regarding the climate issue.

We have repeatedly decried the incoherence of French policies that focus on the development of intermittent renewable sources of electricity. These policies are, as we have already largely developed, costly, risky for the security of supply and without significant impact on the climate.

What should we make of recent events, with the Leaders' Summit on Climate Change hosted by Joe Biden and with the European Union's announcement of its 2030 objectives?

The first obvious fact is that diplomatic leadership on climate change is still exercised by the Sino-American axis and that Europe is trailing behind, cobbling together a last-minute agreement on its 2030 objectives so as not to arrive empty-handed before the two big players.

As is often the case, the debate was an opportunity to squabble over figures that are only for show, without any analysis of their real impact or of how to achieve them. The Commission proposed raising the greenhouse gas emissions reduction target for 2030 from 40% to 50%. The Parliament immediately raised the stakes to 60%. And of course, we ended up at 55%, plus some twists and turns involving carbon sinks, so that the real target is 52.8%.

The second obvious fact is that the European leadership is exercised by Germany in alliance with the green-political movement, including the French representatives, some of whom were even  dispatched to Brussels by the President of the Republic.

How can France allow nuclear power, a source of carbon-free electricity, to be lumped together with natural gas, which emits 100 times more CO₂?

How can France, as it is chairing the Parliament's Environment Committee, shoot itself in the foot and cave in to political or dogmatic interests (with no relation to the interests of the planet) that pamper gas and kill nuclear power?

According to recent official EU statements, nuclear power is presumably still not included in the European Union's sustainable financing taxonomy. How would it be possible for France to accept this, after Emmanuel Macron's very clear letter on the subject?

The European Commission (which, behind its soothing discourse on the climate, is, in fact, committed to special interests) and the Parliament (infiltrated by ecologist-political doctrines) are joining forces on a path that violates the interests of the climate and, incidentally, those of France.

And France, weak within a weak continent, accepts to sacrifice one of its major assets (both economic and environmental) by giving in to the coordinated, self-interested and determined maneuvers of those who seek only to preserve interests that are in no way ecological.

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