PAmong influencers’ recipes, sharing two-hour PowerPoint slides full of fossil fuel charts is not the most proven. Yet it is in this way that Jean-Marc Jancovici has built up an incredible audience. The polytechnic expert in energy and climate, known for his positions in favor of nuclear power, has a cohort of fans who follow him on his site and his YouTube channel, who share his interviews, buy his books: Climate change explained to my daughter (Threshold, 2009) as well as Fill it up please (Seuil, 2006, co-written with Alain Grandjean) have each sold 35,000 copies …
We meet them as well during a meeting organized by the Confédération paysanne in Nogent-le-Rotrou as in the auditorium of the ESCP Business School or on LinkedIn, a professional network usually devoted to self-congratulation. His posts filled with technical information and sarcasm about greenwashing provoke a lot of discussion and are followed by 353,000 subscribers. The young engineers (and their parents) who make up his fan club have discovered that you can be worried without being dumb. They like that Jean-Marc Jancovici does not offer them to live in the woods but deploys a sort of business plan for ecological transition.
How do we recognize them?
They say “Janco”. They didn’t get to him by his place in mainstream media – most of them don’t even know he writes on RTL (where he was imposed by M6) and at L’Express -, but by its eight online courses given at the Ecole des mines (one and a half hours each, followed by pencil and paper in hand) on which they came across “By the coincidence of YouTube”. They then watched everything, the conferences of “Sciences Po 2019” and Centrale Nantes (which lasts three hours), but refrain from viewing two in a row for fear of plunging into depression. Finding old passages in the show “C dans l’air” gave them the opportunity to admire ” coherence “ of “Janco”.
Now, when new lecture videos are uploaded, they skip the lecture – which they already know – and go straight to the questions. They convinced their fathers (the fan-club of “Janco” is predominantly male), not unhappy to see an engineer’s speech come back into fashion. They rely on its openness to nuclear power to assert that it is “Not sectarian”. They like to say that they are not “Not agree with everything”, often use the words “Decarbonize” and ” magnitude “ and count like him their energy consumption in “Slave equivalent”. They can admit that they have already changed their mind on a topic. They also appreciate the economist and Jesuit priest Gaël Giraud and the physicist at CEA Etienne Klein.
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