Nicolas Hulot: "We have already lost the climate fight"

Vigilant of a planet that threatens to sink under the increasingly visible assaults of natural disasters and global warming, Nicolas Hulot has never given up his role as whistleblower.

Despite the confinement which forces him to speak to us at a distance from the library of his Breton house, the former Minister of Ecology has chosen to come out of his silence to call again the world leaders to a jump.

The timing is right, as the EU meets until Friday to try to step up its promises to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

And while the signatories of the Paris agreement will meet again, five years later, at a virtual summit on Saturday, organized by the UN, France and the United Kingdom.

The government has just unveiled its first arbitrations to the 150 members of the citizens' climate convention.

Their proposals were not all accepted and they believe that some have been "unraveled" ...

NICOLAS HULOT.

The President of the Republic had promised to give their proposals without filter to the legislators.

However, a certain number seems to be called into question.

Apart from the reservations expressed by Emmanuel Macron on three measures, it is very important that the others are subject to the appreciation of the deputies.

We have to be very careful that promises are kept because participatory democracy has often been seen as a sham and that this has contributed to the logic of citizens' mistrust of public authorities.

Beware of dashed hopes that cause humiliation.

We cannot send all the proposals to European level either.

For example, on transport, we must hear the proposal of the Citizens' Convention to ban the sale of the most polluting vehicles from 2025.

You believe that the draft law in preparation is "not up to" the climate challenge.

For environmentalists, the government is never doing enough?

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We are at a decisive moment when the future of humanity is being played out.

We need high standards, consistency and convergence, not complacency.

The High Council for the Climate estimates that to keep our commitments to reduce greenhouse gases, it would be necessary to go two to three times faster.

We will therefore need an ambitious climate law and above all credible in its resources.

This law is the last opportunity in this five-year period to push the sliders to the maximum to limit breakage.

In the building sector, we must create an obligation for comprehensive renovation work associated with quadrupled public aid, for example.

The government is fortunate to rely on the work of citizens who originally had no prejudices on these subjects.

This collective intelligence must not remain a dead letter.

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Saturday, we will celebrate the five years of the Paris climate conference.

Are there really reasons to celebrate anything?

I did not go kidding when signing the Paris agreements, because I knew the virtue of the text but especially its weakness: it did not have a binding aspect.

Often, states get rid of a problem by setting goals to save time.

And then, along the way, as there has been no method, no progress report or transparency on the commitments of the states, we realize, five years later, that we are absolutely not on the trajectory that we had set for ourselves.

However, it is possible to correct the shortcomings of the Paris Agreement by making national commitments binding.

With my foundation, we propose that the provisions provided for in trade agreements, and in particular the reduction in customs duties, only be triggered if the reduction path is respected.

Isn't the Covid crisis likely to eclipse the fight against global warming?

There is always a risk that one crisis will overshadow another.

I fully understand that for our fellow citizens, this health crisis preempts their fears.

It is the most palpable crisis.

It paralyzes us, scares us.

But this health crisis is only the avatar of a much deeper crisis in the ecological and economic system.

It has shown that it costs much less to anticipate disasters than to deal with them urgently.

In January 2020, the former Minister of Ecology was speaking at the ChangeNow summit.

LP / Guillaume Georges  

The EU is meeting until Friday to raise its climate ambitions.

Do you fear a new high mass for nothing?

The aim is to raise Europe's targets by reducing our emissions by 55% by 2030 instead of 40%.

We still have to give ourselves the means.

Will each euro of the European recovery plan be conditioned on compliance with ecological and climatic criteria?

Will this money be allocated to yesterday's economy, to models of the past by financing energies such as gas or to those of tomorrow, by going to thermal insulation of housing?

The Council of State has just recognized that we should not wait until the end of the objectives we have set ourselves to find that we have not respected them.

This is what happened with glyphosate, where we waited three years to find out we had failed.

We could have realized it in the first year because we did not have the means to get out.

PODCAST.

The day ... Nicolas Hulot resigned live on France Inter

Is Joe Biden's election good news for the climate?

This will give one less argument to those who drag their feet on the pretext that one of the greatest nations in the world, and the one with one of the strongest ecological impacts, had left the Paris agreements.

Anyway, anything is better than the casual and negationist attitude of Donald Trump.

In response to environmentalists calling for a moratorium on 5G, the President of the Republic had called them Amish followers of the "oil lamp".

Must have bothered you?

All as much as we are, we must be careful of clumsy words or other anathemas that we use, especially in a France which is tearing itself apart from the inside, is breaking up and where violence is more and more pregnant.

We can be in a confrontation of ideas but when we fall into a form of caricature, we neutralize any form of serious reflection, it cuts short the awareness.

Do not caricature ecology.

Let us not give a pretext for stupid or sterile confrontations.

Especially in the current climate, made of mistrust, confrontations, societal disintegration.

I can see the violence that reigns on social networks, during demonstrations.

That dialogue no longer exists.

And I fear in the long term that this will lead to the fragmentation of our democracy.

We must get out of this logic of confrontation and partisan spirit.

And remember that the violence of words can precede the violence of actions.

Beware of the vortices of all anger!

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A controversy over Christmas trees, another over the pollution caused by the Tour de France ... Are some environmentalists going too far?

There are measures that may appear to be symbolic, but that should not obscure the basic debate.

Do not rush into these sterile controversies to caricature environmentalists.

We should at least have the humility to recognize that everyday history has consistently proved them right.

And if some people had been concerned about ecology earlier instead of turning their backs on it, we wouldn't be there.

You had the chance to discover the most magical places on the planet.

Isn't it easier to mobilize when you have seen these treasures of nature and biodiversity so closely?

I saw the planet in its diversity but above all in its fragility.

I saw how quickly deforestation and desertification were at work.

How quickly scarcity was becoming the norm.

However, scarcity is the stage which precedes scarcity which is itself the crucible of all barbarities.

That’s why I’m probably living things a little more in the guts because it’s not just numbers on a report.

I am inhabited by it.

In 2005, Nicolas Hulot, here at the editorial staff of Le Parisien, launched the “Défi pour la Terre”.

LP / Philippe Lavieille  

This is our fifteenth interview together and your eyes are increasingly dark on the future of our planet.

Do you still think we can win this fight?

Somehow, we have already lost the climate fight.

Because we already know that the world of tomorrow will be different: we will have a multiplication of epidemics, difficulties in producing food resources because the temperature will change, the rising water levels will displace millions of inhabitants.

And we are already measuring the consequences: hundreds of thousands of people leave their homelands every year because of weather phenomena, families in a situation of survival have been forced into exodus.

We can still act on the intensity of the phenomena and their impacts and avoid irreversible chain reactions, but we only have ten years ahead of us.

Optimism, pessimism… This is an outdated question.

Let us be uncompromising, do the maximum.

Our children are watching us, we will be responsible to them because we knew and we still had everything to do otherwise.