QWhatever the accounting method, it must be recognized: the climate impact of private jet travel by a few wealthy people is tiny, negligible. According to estimates by the Ministry of Transport, in 2019 it only accounted for less than 0.1% of France’s greenhouse gas emissions. Prohibiting this mode of transport would change little or nothing in the national climate assessment and would have the only effect of unnecessarily upsetting a small minority of personalities, while undermining a hundred thousand direct or indirect jobs, and destroying an activity which represents, depending on the sector, an annual turnover of around 29 billion euros.
Diverting the conversation, fixing the orders of magnitude, putting figures on the problems: it is with the appearance of a rational approach to the question that the Minister for Energy Transition, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, initially brushed aside the controversy. Private jets are “clearly a very limited problem in terms of climate impactshe said, on August 30, on France Inter. That environmentalists are making a fight out of it shows how off the mark they are. »
A few days later, reacting to the controversy opened by the words of PSG coach Christophe Galtier – ironically about the sand yachts that the club’s players could use to replace their transport in private planes -, Mme Pannier-Runacher adjusted his speech to the extent of the outcry, estimating this time that “PSG’s response is not commensurate” of the climate issue, and calling the club “to take this subject very seriously”.
Misunderstanding cleared up
Why such a turnaround? At first, the controversy could be understood as an instrumentalization of the climate crisis, by ecologists, intended to stigmatize the splendor of the lifestyle of the wealthiest. But secondly, the fact that a footballer as adored as Kylian Mbappé is also the target of popular indignation – while top athletes almost always escape criticism of their remuneration – has dispelled this misunderstanding.
What may seem like a truism may, in reality, augur a profound change in the perception of social inequalities. They are no longer defined only by the distribution of wealth in society, but also by the power of destruction of the environment mechanically associated with this wealth. However, there is a big difference between these two ways of looking at socio-economic inequalities. On the one hand, there is no limit to the amount of wealth produced and distributable; on the other hand, there is only a limited stock of carbon to be emitted to avoid destroying a common good, namely the earth’s climate.
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