French President Emmanuel Macron during his television intervention on September 24, 2023 (AFP/Ian LANGSDON)
After several postponements, Emmanuel Macron must present on Monday the main axes of “ecological planning” which he intends to make a marker of his five-year term, despite an environmental assessment deemed so far insufficient.
“I am convinced that we have a path which is that of French ecology”, “an ecology of progress”, “which is neither denial”, “nor the cure which consists of saying +it will be a massacre+”, pleaded the head of state on Sunday evening during his television interview.
On Monday, he brings together at 3:00 p.m. at the Elysée, for the second time, the Ecological Planning Council created after his re-election, with Elisabeth Borne and the ministers concerned. His concluding speech will be broadcast.
According to his entourage, this is the high point of the sequence launched by Emmanuel Macron between the two rounds of the presidential election. At a meeting in Marseille, he promised that his future Prime Minister would be “directly responsible for ecological planning” in order to go “twice as fast” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030. .
The second five-year term “will be ecological or it will not be”, launched the one whose first mandate had disappointed environmental defenders, and who was to try to rally left-wing voters in view of the ballot against the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen.
The head of government orchestrated the work which made it possible to identify, sector by sector (transport, industries, agriculture, etc.), the effort necessary to meet France’s decarbonization objectives, and around fifty “levers” to achieve this. An additional seven billion euros have been allocated to the ecological transition for 2024.
– “The car”, “I love it” –
Elisabeth Borne during the presentation of ecological development to members of the Conseil National de la Refondation (CNR) at Matignon in Paris, September 19, 2023 (POOL/AFP/Archives/Emmanuel DUNAND)
Elisabeth Borne then cleared the ground by presenting the outlines of this plan to party leaders and civil society last week. If the observation was considered “lucid” by environmentalists, they are demanding to move from words to actions, and to finance this titanic project beyond 2024.
A subject of tension, the question of the connection between ecology and purchasing power has entered the debate at a time when energy and fuel prices are soaring. Several opponents have called for very strong regulation of the price of electricity.
On purchasing power, “ecology is the answer”, replied Emmanuel Macron on Sunday.
But for the moment this strategy suffers from being very technical and therefore unlikely to mobilize society around the fight against global warming. Macronie therefore urged the President of the Republic to step up to “embody” a unifying “grand narrative”.
On TF1 and France 2, he already declared on Sunday that France would exit coal by 2027, by converting its last two power stations, but he did not set a date for exiting oil and fossil gas, much to the damage from the Greenpeace organization.
Faithful to his line of a “non-punitive” ecology, he promised to “support the most modest households” in their own ecological transition, and multiplied the messages to show that he intended to encourage rather than prohibit.
By giving up on banning gas boilers, after having thought about it, so as not to penalize rural areas – the deployment of heat pumps will on the other hand be “supported”.
And winking at motorists. The French, “we love cars, and I love them,” said Emmanuel Macron. He therefore advocated, here too, “support” to “push our households to give up old diesel and old thermal vehicles” to move towards “hybrid” and “increasingly electric”.
Anti-pollution control, July 31, 2001 in Paris (AFP/Archives/Eric Feferberg)
“But we must do it by being intelligent, that is to say by producing vehicles and batteries at home”, rather than by importing them from the United States or China, added the president, who wants “ reindustrialize through ecology”.
Is there any new announcements coming this Monday to make this ambition concrete? “We have to be super concrete, without giving a moralizing lesson,” believes in any case a government figure involved in the matter, judging that the French must perceive their own “benefit” from engaging in this transition.
© 2023 AFP
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