Lhe guilt of environmental movements is a common trope of public conversation, and the favorite figure of speech of laissez-faire propagandists. Throughout the year that is ending, this trend has taken on extravagant proportions, boosted by the growing importance of social networks and “all-news” television in the animation of democratic debate – provided that such expression still has meaning. “It’s the fault of the ecologists! » : it is the language element of the year.
If this refrain has come up so often in 2022, it is precisely because the past year has been dramatically marked by the damage linked to the degradation of the climate and the environment, amplified by the war in Ukraine. In short, the more the unfolding of events retrospectively proves environmentalists right, the more their adversaries must stigmatize them in order to defeat them.
This is a classic case of Orwellian inversion. “War is peace”, “slavery is freedom” and the effects of climate change, “It’s the fault of the ecologists”. Thus the fires that ravaged French forests all summer long: at Teste-de-Buch (Gironde), ” the ecologists “ have successfully fought, for two years, a management plan for the used forest intended to make it more easily accessible to firefighters. This false information, launched on July 15 on Twitter by a anonymousthen immediately reprise by a famous advertiser and host of the M6 channel, was enough to fuel the controversy. For a week, it generated a considerable amount of comments on social networks and television sets, before several press titles, in particular 20 Minutesdemonstrate its false nature.
As a result of shifting and generalization, public opinion is thus imprinted on the idea that environmental policies are in reality… dangerous for the environment. And all the time spent commenting on this false information, then denying it, was so much less time to discuss the root causes of this summer’s monster fires: global warming, the generalization of highly flammable softwood monocultures, etc.
Abusive guilt
Same narrative about the sinking of the French nuclear fleet, whose production was historically low this year: if the power stations are in carafe, it would be because of the historical hostility of ecologists for the atom. However, we don’t really know when ” the ecologists “ may have been in a position to seriously impede the development of the nuclear industry. Or how they could have played a decisive role in the corrosion problems that led to reactor shutdowns throughout the year.
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