The president accuses his critics of having tried to “caricature” his “ecological warning message” into “a message of denial”.
Only a few seconds have – unfavorably – caught the attention. On Saturday, December 31, while presenting the longest “wishes to the French” in presidential history, Emmanuel Macron let out an unfortunate little sentence. “Who could have predicted (…) the climate crisis with spectacular effects again this summer in our country?“, he saw fit to question, in an allusion to the heat waves and the devastating fires which multiplied six months ago. Very quickly, the words of the Head of State sparked an outcry on the left, and a wave of indignation among environmentalists.
To the point of forcing him to justify himself, Tuesday evening, in a video published on YouTube. “I was misunderstood“, he regretted, before “plead” its cause. “They wanted me to say that, basically, I would never have read any report from the IPCC, the IPBES, from all the experts… And that I was discovering climate change in the year 2022“, he quipped. “I have a lot of humility, but we’ve been acting for years“, he defended himself, judging that the “attackswho recently targeted him weren’tvery believable“. “I have the feeling that there was, all the same, a lot of bad faith behind what happened in recent days“, he lamented.
Emmanuel Macron then finally agreed to clarify his point. “What did I just mean? Basically, it was even faster than expected. And that, I believe, is quite true. Even all those who, for years, have been warning about the collapse of biodiversity, about the disruption of the climate, have said “look, last summer, things are going even faster than we predicted, and we are even more affected than we expected”. I didn’t want to say anything more. So it was more of an ecological warning message, where they wanted to caricature me in a message of denial. I don’t believe that’s true“, concluded the president.