The first emergency measures to redress the economy do not sufficiently integrate the climate issue, which will have to be better taken into account in the overall recovery plan, warns the High Council for Climate in its annual report on Wednesday. For this body responsible for evaluating public policies against global warming, France is "very far" from its objectives in the fight against global warming. "We must insert the recovery plan within the limits of the climate and not the reverse," sums up Corinne Le Quéré, president of the HCC, for whom "the first provisions of the government in the recovery plan do not go in the direction of our recommendations ” .
These emergency measures were in fact "mainly directed towards the highly emitting sectors of the automobile and aviation, without firm conditionalities concerning their evolution towards a trajectory compatible with the climatic objectives" , adds the climatologist by presenting to the presses the second annual report of the HCC, an organization launched by Emmanuel Macron in November 2018. The government, for its part, believes that it has set conditions, notably for Air France, by asking for a limitation of domestic flights when a rail alternative in less than 2:30 a.m. is possible.
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After calling France's actions against global warming “insufficient” last year , the HCC stresses that the 0.9% drop in greenhouse gas emissions recorded in 2019 is “still far from -3% (per year) expected from 2025 ” . And if " the mobilization of public authorities is visible and growing, concretely there have been few advances in the year which has just passed" , underlined its president again.
For 2020, the situation has changed with the deep Covid crisis. The President of the Republic promised an ecological revival in the wake of the municipal elections, marked by a green wave, and the end of the Citizen's Climate Convention, from which he promised to take up 146 of the 149 proposals, but without the details of their implementation are not yet specified. Chiche, essentially replies the president of the High Council for Climate, for whom "the recovery plan will be the real measure of the attention paid to the climate" by the new government.
the rate of decline in emissions is too low. We have the same cars, the same roads, the same heating systems and the same industries.
Corinne Le Quéré, President of the HCCBecause for the time being, "the rate of decline in emissions is too low and structural transformations are not underway in any of the four most emitting sectors" , namely transport (30%), agriculture, construction and l industry (18 to 19% each), according to the climatologist. "We have the same cars, the same roads, the same heating systems and the same industries," notes the High Council, while neighboring Germany has for example arrowed its aid to the automotive sector only on electric vehicles. An "extremely clear signal for the whole sector" and a way to avoid a "scrapping bonus" which would only be used to sell stocks without making it possible to adapt "to the challenges ahead" .
He cites measures that can be "compatible with climate objectives" , such as "the energy renovation of buildings (which) has benefits from all angles and could be a pro-climate strong point of the recovery plan" . Renovation that the Citizen Convention has rightly proposed to make mandatory, while the housing sector has been integrated into the Ministry of Ecological Transition in the new government.
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To support his recommendations, the HCC asked to be received by the Ecological Defense Council which Emmanuel Macron is soon to assemble. And Bruno Le Maire, at the helm of Bercy with an enlarged perimeter and centered on recovery, has undertaken to "send" the future plan to the High Council "before it is completely fixed," explains Corinne Le Quéré.
