2022 was the hottest year ever in France. Ministers have tried to defend the President after the climate release that infuriated environmentalists and climate scientists
FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
PARIS – It was a particularly hot end of the year in France with record temperatures of 24 degrees in Dax and 23 degrees in Biscarrosse on the Atlantic coast. The whole of 2022 was the hottest year in the country’s history, according to data from Meto France. Nothing that should really come as a surprise, given the alarms that have been repeated for years, but President Emmanuel Macron said a phrase in his New Year’s address to the French that has sparked much controversy: who could have predicted the climate crisis?.
Champagne ran sideways for environmentalists and climatologists, as the more or less catastrophic forecasts about greenhouse gases and the consequences for the environment for decades were not taken into account. Macron seemed to employ the same tactics, including on the climate, that he had shown on other issues: he showed himself to be a capable and responsive leader, capable of understanding the difficulties of the world and a history that he believes has become tragic, to oppose it immediately, common expression.
No one could have really foreseen the Russian invasion of Ukraine – except for American intelligence, but only a few months before – and its impact on energy bills and the European economy more generally. And no one could have accurately predicted a pandemic like Covid’s (although many, from Jacques Attali to Bill Gates, have warned for years about the common danger posed by viruses). But when it comes to the climate crisis, the most dire predictions have been circulating since at least the 1970s. So how could Macron utter such a sentence?
His government ministers are trying to defend him. According to Energy Transition Minister Agns Pannier-Runacher, Macron did not suddenly discover global warming. In the New Year’s speech, he did not talk about the climate crisis itself, but about its concrete effects on the daily life of the French: who could have predicted this summer’s mega fires near Arcachon? That meant the President.
It is true that we are struggling to understand climate change, adds Economy Minister Bruno le Maire. I think this year, with the very mild winter we’re going through, with the disasters we’ve experienced this summer, the collective consciousness of society is growing.
Instead, Macron’s blip could betray an attempt to counter accusations that he has not done enough to combat global warming, as if the problem – at least in its proportions – had been underestimated by everyone. The climate researcher Jean Jouzel interviewed by France Info recalls a meeting at the Elysée in September 2013, where the dramatic conclusions of the fifth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were presented. There was then-President François Hollande and his deputy general secretary, a certain Emmanuel Macron. Ten years have passed since this report and I don’t understand how Macron can utter such a sentence today, says Jouzel. According to Macronist MP Pascal Canfin, Macron wanted to express what many French people feel instinctively, namely an acceleration of phenomena that not even some scientists had foreseen at this speed.
At the top of the opinion polls after the summer of 2019, the climate issue has been replaced by purchasing power and the war in Ukraine. But it is still present among the issues perceived as the most urgent, and represents the fourth concern of Europeans according to the Eurobarometer published in September 2022.
January 4, 2023 (change January 4, 2023 | 6:36 p.m.)
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