“Climate change is not a natural reality, but a highly political problem”

2023-04-21 05:00:08

Ln April 11, at the National Assembly, Christophe Béchu, Minister for Ecological Transition and Territorial Cohesion, exclaimed: “The disruption [climatique] is a reality that is not political, but natural. Stop making them controversial. (…) Stop ideology, enter into pragmatism and solutions. It is at this price that we will reunite our fellow citizens with ecology. By not making it a sterile battlefield. »

A few days later, on April 14, journalist Hugo Clément reacted to a violent controversy on social networks. While he was accused of having contributed to trivializing the National Rally and allowing a vast “greenwashing” operation of the party by going to debate with Jordan Bardella in an event organized by the reactionary and xenophobic magazine Current values, where he received long applause and the anointing from the leader of the far-right party (who notably declared: “I share a lot of what was said. And I think that if political ecology wants to carry out its fight to alert public opinion, it might take less Sandrine Rousseau and a little more Hugo Clément”), the journalist replied: “We have to discuss with EVERYONE (…). The real victory of ecology will be the day when ALL the political parties will propose measures to meet the challenges. »

These two episodes plunge us into the heart of the problem: is ecology political? Left or right? Should it on the contrary escape any controversy, in a transpartisan logic? In this case, should we try to convince reactionary parties, openly xenophobic, undemocratic, repressive towards minorities and LGBTQIA+ communities, to commit to the future of the planet in the name of a higher interest – on the grounds that if the planet becomes uninhabitable, everything else would be incidental?

Deep transformations

Let’s start with the political question. Contrary to what Christophe Béchu asserts, climate change is not a reality “natural”, but a social as well as a geophysical phenomenon, caused by decades of human activities, which result from political decisions and orientations.

It is therefore a highly political problem, which calls into question both our ways of thinking and the organization of our societies. And which will not be resolved by a few consensual technical measures, but by profound transformations.

Read the picture: Article reserved for our subscribers Hugo Clément, a media all by itself at the service of the environmental fight

One can then wonder if all the parties are ready for these upheavals. Because for the majority of them, since the end of the XIX^e century, the democratic consensus on which they are based is based on a simple idea: to maximize the productive forces, and therefore the general production of wealth, then to redistribute it, in order to tear oneself away from the “valley of tears”. This hollow consensus could until now be declined on the left as on the right: on the one hand rationalize production, redistribute arithmetically the wealth produced; on the other hand, liberate private enterprise and redistribute the merit of each one on a pro rata basis.

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