Sotto voce
The Convention actually recognised this point, but only sotto voce. On page 56 of its 460 page final report it proposed that, “The whole of the French population should be made aware (of environmental issues) by linking an understanding of the climate emergency to engagement in action” because, it explained, “raising awareness is more effectively done by ‘acting together’ rather than cascading information downwards”.
They ruined the point by making the “acting together” a matter of three things: participative projects like gardens or neighbourhood workshops on cooking, cosmetics, cleaning materials and clothes; local evening debates; and mini citizens’ climate conventions. All worthy – indeed necessary – but nothing there to worry those 90 business leaders and their grab for dollops of taxpayers’ cash.
One proposal from the Convention that got quickly trashed was the suggestion that the upper speed limit on France’s motorways should be cut from 130 to 110kph, roughly equivalent to Britain’s 70mph. Opponents quickly unearthed an environment ministry report back in 2018 which had argued such a reduction would “cost” the handsome sum of 550 million Euros.
Quotation marks are there because there is some sleight of hand in how this figure is calculated which perhaps gets to the heart of the debate through which Macron is trying to guide the French.
That is that environmentalism should not be dogmatic but pragmatic, not be punitive but should seek to persuade, all code words for an approach that sooths the agitated fears of those business leaders as they lie back in their chauffeur-driven limousines (for how could they have company jets when they are so committed to the climate?).
The 100-page ministry report was published before Hulot had decided to stop lying to himself. It arose from a proposal adopted by France’s 2014 Environment Conference when Macron was a mere backroom manipulator in the Elysée, not the one in charge. It estimated that a limit of 110kph would cost 1,150 million Euros a year because of “the loss of time involved”.
There are among the French those who prefer never to waste a minute when on the road. Long time star of radio interviewing, Jean-Jacques Bourdin, whose quick-fire, insistent questions often get in the way of anyone answering him, turns out to be much the same when behind the wheel. Toward the end of the lockdown, he was clocked doing 186kph on the A75 motorway in the south because “the road was empty and the weather magnificent”.
On air a couple of days later, without the slightest sign of remorse, he offered two “valid” reasons for his speeding. He had left Paris to see his mother in a care home and had, he explained, a document “showing he could travel during the confinement” issued by his employer (the private tv and radio channel BFMTV, on strike for the election results because its owner, post-Covid, is aiming to “save” cash and staff).
Readers can work out for themselves the hypocrisy of his first “valid” reason, but the second needs a factual rebuttal. Journalists could move about during the French lockdown, using their press card or a statement from their employer, but only when doing so for reasons of work. Visiting one’s parents has never counted as work for journalists, nor anyone else for that matter. Not a journalist in the French media pointed this out, such is the dominant tolerance of speeding. Even the green hero of the hour, Yannick Jadot, now preparing himself as a presidential candidate, was among those opposing the lower limit: “Who does not like to go fast? I adore it.”
But what the hell, Bourdin is not the only public figure to be caught by a police camera. Emmanuelle Wargon, a minister in that environment department, was caught speeding at 150kph in an official car in February 2019 on a stretch of motorway where the limit had been reduced to 110kph because of atmospheric pollution due to weather conditions. Her office made it clear she knew the speed the car was going at. Journalists were briefed that “We did not see that we had been flashed but that corresponds, in effect, to the speed at which we were going” and were told of “diary pressures”.
Wargon was following in the tyre tracks of her boss, Premier Edouard Philippe. When he was just a right-wing MP, doubling as the Mayor of Le Havre back in 2015, he, too, was caught at 150kph in a 110 limit. Luckily, Wargon, like Philippe and Bourdin, has not killed anyone when speeding, nor, so far, been killed. Which saved her partner, Mathias, head of A&E at the Delafontaine hospital in Saint Denis, the gruesome duty of seeing her pass through his service as one of the 3,239 who died on France’s roads last year.
Human life and statistics
The deadly total is relevant because the 2018 report sets a number of things against that cost in terms of time “lost” when driving at a reasonable speed. One is what it terms “The statistical value of a human life”. This it sets at 3 million Euros. On page 23, in what is the shortest section in the entire document, we are told that the total “cost” saved by the lower limit would be only 150 million Euros in fewer dead and injured.
But, if Emmanuelle Wargon were to leave Mathias’ A&E service for the morgue, would some cash register in his head just go “Kchung!! Oh dear, there goes 3 million”? And if any such thought were to pass through his brain, on what possible basis would he have calculated that very, very round sum?
The document suggests some other costs alongside time wasted. Two hundred Euros per new panel announcing the new limit, for instance. That at least may have some material basis in fact. But how can, or dare, a government calculate the loss of a human life for these purposes at 3 million Euros? The paragraph on lives lost, for that is all it is, refers one back to an earlier technical note for an explanation of why that sum represents the statistical value of a human life. Something that, despite several readings of this lengthy note, was not to be found.
That one should seek at all to “monetise” a human life so you can place it in some sort of see-saw balance against the “cost” of time lost by driving sensibly is, in itself, both typical of the ethics of the business and financial world within which Macron matured and hopes to rejoin, and is utterly offensive. The figure is, of course, arbitrarily small enough never to outmatch the inflated cost attributed to time lost for those hurtling along because the weather is nice or racing from one appointment to another in an overcrowded ministerial diary.
Changing how we drive so we save both lives and the environment is a good metaphor for how individuals and society need to change so that what we do is not just green-washing.
Fading green
One of the 90 business leaders signing that May appeal, Jean-Pierre Clamadieu of Engie, gave a special interview to LeMonde on Thursday 25 June, as Macron was putting the final touches to his ideas on how to launch his green revival. There were good things in the Citizens’ Convention package, but “there are just some propositions which have left me a little perplexed, like the fact of talking of a tax on dividends”.
Now that idea, a tax of 4% on dividends, did not please someone else either. Four days later, the 150 convention members were gathered together in the garden of the Elysée palace. The weather was as nice as when Bourdin was flashed. Macron was his jaunty, confident self of old. Smirking like a cheeky scamp who has just dropped their used chewing gum on the pavement, he stepped up to the podium to announce that among their 149 proposals were three “jokers” that he would be ditching right away.
Jean-Pierre Clamadieu will keep the whole of his dividends; Wargon, still an environment minister in a re-organised government, can fulfil her diary at 90mph; and the French constitution will not include an over-arching priority for saving the planet. So you now know what Macron meant when he said he would place “the environmental ambition at the heart of the productive model”.
It only took that one week for the green-washing to begin to fade. Macron’s new government was formed with a politician currently under investigation over a rape complaint as Interior Minister, a Justice Minister whose principal qualification appears to be his ability to enrage his fellow lawyers and the rest of the squad the same as those who took France into Covid without a mask in sight. On the environment, not one of the independent green leaders he had hoped to entice into his clutches was prepared to get on board.
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Chris Myant | Radio Free (2020-07-07T11:03:39+00:00) Macron's green-washing. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/07/macrons-green-washing/
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