Emmanuel Macron’s Weak Pandemic Response Is a Bad Omen for His Promises on Climate Action
▻https://jacobinmag.com/2020/05/emmanuel-macron-covid-coronavirus-environment-climate-change
The strict quarantine to slow the spread of the virus is rubbing salt into the wounds of a France that has recently experienced an exceptionally long period of social unrest. From the start of the gilets jaunes uprising almost a year and a half ago to the mass movement against a proposed pension reform, France’s streets have seen huge mobilizations, with the question of climate change and solidarity at the core of those popular movements.
The parallels that can already be drawn between the coronavirus pandemic and the climate crisis will be crucial for approaching climate politics going forward. Central to this comparison are the blatant inequalities in terms of who is most affected and the call for broad restructuring of economies and societies. Moreover, in this comparison, we can find the material bases for reimagining political responses to both COVID-19 and the climate crisis.
It seems reasonable to believe that Emmanuel Macron had planned to focus the last portion of his five-year term on climate and environmental concerns, in what can be understood as the third step in his reelection strategy:
Accelerate the process of desegregating the rigidity of the French social system and labor law. Liberalize the economy and ensure that social security is reduced to a safety net while creating an economic environment favorable to investors, in what the economic orthodoxy would call a “modernization” effort.
Construct an image of himself as a European leader and visionary, profiting from the unwillingness of Angela Merkel and Germany to take up this role.
Turn to issues of environment and climate change to consolidate the “progressive” and even planetary aspects of this visionary profile, thus ensuring he would be viewed as responsive to the “progressive” wing of his electoral coalition.
This April 11 the convention — brought together via video conference — produced a list of fifty proposals to the government. While this list has not yet been made public, enough of the text has been leaked to reveal that, particularly in light of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, the proposals are already outdated. Some of the proposals do go in the right direction — “building renovations, limitation of urban expansion, support for biking options in urban and rural areas, etc.” — but as a whole, they are tainted with the sort of “sustainable development thinking” dear to the United Nations and other international institutions. This approach was already clearly insufficient before the current crisis, and the convention’s proposals are now that much further from responding to the clarion call for massive social change brought forward by the pandemic.
Upon analyzing the crisis and its possible consequences, it seems that perceptions of risk, collective danger, and preparedness will remain unsettled among the general public, at least for a while. For people in power, giving the impression that everything will be done in the same way, and at the same scale, that it was before could prove a poor strategy, risking them to be perceived as out of touch. And this seems to be something that Macron has acknowledged and understood. This is why he has declared himself opening the door to “outside the box” thinking, claiming that he “feels the profound need to reinvent something new.”
If Macron is sincere about the need for change, we must ask if this will translate into a moratorium on investment by French companies in fossil fuels, particularly those gas-related investments responsible for half the increase in CO2 emissions since 2012. In a time when the price of oil has dramatically plummeted — reaching even the nonsensical depths of negative value — will there be a redefinition of the fossil-fuel sector, organized by the state and involving concrete support for workers?
Bailing out the fossil fuel or aviation industries without restructuring them, reskilling their workers, and reframing their management would represent a total denial of the climate emergency — and, indeed, of the essence of what it is to “govern” the crisis.
Les subventions à Air France et Renault sont de mauvais signes !
