“The house is on fire.” With his way with words, Jacques Chirac left a lasting impression in 2002 during the Johannesburg Earth Summit when he described the alarming state of our planet. He added, “we are looking the other way.” Nearly twenty years later, the situation remains rigorously the same, if not worse…
According to the American-Belgian-Swiss think tank Global Footprint Network, France had already consumed by May 5th, due to its lifestyle, the resources that would normally take a year to replenish. It is among the leading countries in terms of energy expenditure and is one of the largest producers of various types of pollution.
Of course, this kind of calculation is highly debatable. Of course, the ideology—political or ecological, take your pick—that backs this think tank aims to create a buzz with an alarming yet credible announcement. It would be a mistake to dismiss its main teaching with a wave of the hand: endless growth, with unbridled consumption as its corollary, is leading us straight into a wall.
The time has passed for debating among tea cups over whether the climate skeptics—still a vanishing species!—like professor and former minister Claude Allègre, or the experts from the IPCC were right or wrong. The “martyrdom” inflicted by humans on nature is undeniably there, right before our eyes: storms like Katrina and Cynthia, the collapse of insect populations and consequently birds, the omnipresence of pesticides in the air, water, and food, the masses of plastic in the oceans… While most of us are more or less aligned on this alarming observation—except for Donald Trump, of course—there is, however, no consensus on how to care for the ailing earth.
From time to time, some Diafoirus do sign, with great pomp, agreements under gilded ceilings, but countries stop applying them at the first economic hiccup.
France alone will not resolve the global ecological crisis, but it cannot settle for just eloquent speeches. There are tangible actions that can be taken here and now: a true energy transition with the construction of low-energy buildings and the insulation of older homes, an ambitious transportation policy, and the promotion of renewable energies…
For it is nonetheless paradoxical that in our sun-drenched and wind-swept Southeast, we are so behind on solar and wind energy (a dirty word for some). Regulatory complexity means we lag behind on these topics in Europe, far from the forefront of the most “virtuous” countries.
by Jean-Michel Chevalier, Les Petites Affiches
