Même aux Etats-Unis, on dit que Nicolas Sarkozy has « gone from environmental megalomania to environmental cynicism » (International Herald Tribune – New York Times) !
Cet article dans le New York Times est paru le 29 novembre, et il montre que la formule « l’environnement ça commence à bien faire » est décidément bien le nouveau leitmotiv du Président!
November 29, 2010 French President Criticized for Environmental Shifts
By PATRICIA BRETT
PARIS — Shortly after taking office three years ago, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France surprised friend and foe alike by committing his administration to a series of wide-ranging and far-reaching environmental measures.
Arrived at through a highly publicized conference in 2007 involving industry, environmental organizations and trade unions, the measures included financial incentives to aid development of renewable energy; encouragement for organic agriculture; better infrastructure for mass transit and rail freight; and respecting biodiversity in local development projects.
A “super” Environment Ministry was created, with responsibilities including energy policy and sustainable development and a close political ally of Mr. Sarkozy, Jean-Louis Borloo was named at its head.
But in a cabinet reshuffling this month Mr. Borloo left the government, to be replaced by a more junior minister, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, and the powers of the ministry were substantially curtailed. Energy policy was shifted back to the Finance Ministry and sustainable development disappeared from the agenda — one in a series of retreats that led environmentalists to conclude that Mr. Sarkozy had pruned his environmental ambitions.
“We’ve gone from environmental megalomania to environmental cynicism,” said Yannick Jadot, a member of the European Parliament with the Europe Écologie environmental coalition.
Mr. Jadot, who was a negotiator for Greenpeace at the 2007 conference, accused Mr. Sarkozy of having championed environmental causes during his 2007 election campaign for purely electoral reasons, without any real commitment to pushing through change.
“Fine speeches are O.K.,” he said, but to achieve results “you have to take on a certain number of lobbies.” When it came to doing that, he said, Mr. Sarkozy “pulled out of the picture.”
Mr. Sarkozy’s critics concede that some important steps have been taken in the past three years to set state-of-the-art environmental norms for the construction of new buildings. But they say the drive to strengthen environmental protection in other fields has been stymied by opposition from vested interests, including the powerful agribusiness federation, the Féderation Nationale de Syndicats d’Exploitants Agricole, a traditional mainstay of Mr. Sarkozy’s political party, the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire.
At the Paris Agricultural Show this year, responding to farmers’ hostility to a plan to limit pesticide use — the federation said this and other environmental standards were hobbling the industry’s growth — Mr. Sarkozy shocked environmental activists by saying that “the environment is getting to be a bit much.” The planned limits have since been withdrawn.
Ghislain Gomart, an adviser to Mr. Borloo when he was minister, said the political will to implement the government’s environmental commitments had not faded.
Of the 268 commitments announced three years ago, “96 percent have been undertaken — they’ve been started” according to a ministry-commissioned report, he said.
But Bruno Genty, president of the environmental group France Nature Environment, said that was a meaningless figure. “The report doesn’t tell you if they are under way in a satisfactory manner,” he said. “Some of these commitments have led to nothing more than more discussions.”
Part of the problem, Mr. Genty said, is that the economic crisis has reduced the funding available for environmental changes and has brought a more stringent prioritization of government policies.
With less money to spread around, entrenched interests are being favored over more innovative environmental solutions.
Mr. Genty said the government should “think about cutting aid to those sectors that have a large, negative effect on the environment — intensive agriculture for example.”
Although France is the largest agricultural producer in the European Union, less than 3 percent of its arable land is organically farmed, Mr. Gomart said.
While that figure may be low, it still represents a rise of more than 1 percentage point in two years, he said. And although a target set in the 2007 conference, to convert 6 percent of arable land to organic production by 2012, would not be met, that percentage could still be achieved by 2014, with only a two-year slippage, he said.
The government maintains a goal of 20 percent organic acreage by 2020, he added.
To stimulate the renewable energy sector, EDF, the state-owned power utility, is required to buy electricity produced from renewable sources at a specially favorable price known as a “feed-in tariff.” But, in September, the government announced that it was halving the price that EDF would pay for solar power produced by industrial photovoltaic sources.
“This is a catastrophe for the sector because it causes fear in investors,” said Hadrien Clément, chairman of Nelios, a solar and wind power development company and a member of the Association of Independent Solar Electricity Producers. The tariff had already been cut 30 percent in January, and the government had promised then that the price would remain stable for the next two years, he said.
At the same time, a tax credit to encourage homeowners to install solar panels was also cut from 50 percent to 25 percent of the installation cost. That measure, applied within a week of being announced, “caught everybody short,” Mr. Clément said. “Nine out of 10 projects are now dead in the water.”
And another government decision this summer, he said, hindered the wind-power industry by classifying turbine farms as operations posing a potential threat to the environment.
Mr. Gomart, Mr. Borloo’s adviser, said the reducing of aid for renewable energy was not a response to vested interests, but a reaction to overexpansion in the green energy sector. “The solar sector was overheating, and so was, to a lesser extent, the wind power industry,” he said, pointing out that the solar sector had grown by 600 percent in three years.
The goal set for 2020, to install 5,400 megawatts of renewable generating capacity, could be reached next year, he said. Still, he conceded, installed solar capacity is still only 500 megawatts. If that could run every day, for 24 hours a day — which, for obvious reasons it can’t — it would generate 4.38 million megawatt hours of electricity. In comparison, EDF says its nuclear plants generate 428 million megawatt hours a year.
France’s new energy minister, Eric Besson, taking office this week, declared himself “an intransigent defender of nuclear energy,” a statement that gave environmentalists no joy.
While the renewable sector has grown fast, Mr. Clément said he feared the government now saw the conference targets as caps, rather than first steps toward raising the share of renewable sources in the energy mix beyond the 23 percent mandated by 2020 by a European Union directive. All renewable sources — hydro, solar, wind and biomass — now generate 12 percent of France’s electricity, with about 80 percent supplied by nuclear power.
As for the constraints on wind farms resulting from the classification this summer, Mr. Gomart said they were designed to blunt opposition. “The idea is to have more restrictions so that they will be more acceptable to the public,” he said.
Earlier this month, meanwhile, the government announced it was rebalancing its carrot and stick approach to curbing auto emissions. The change tightened the carbon dioxide emission requirements for a cash subsidy program for low-emission cars, while putting extra taxes on the purchase of gas guzzlers.
Critics of that move say it is unlikely to discourage the wealthy from buying luxury limousines but will make just about every car on the French market ineligible for the rebate program.
“There are a whole series of things that should have resulted from Sarkozy’s comments at the climate conference at Copenhagen, but that he is unable to follow through on,” said Mr. Jadot, referring to the United Nations meeting last year. “That’s why I say we went from environmental megalomania to environmental cynicism.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: Nov. 30, 2010
An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of Yannick Jadot, a European Parliament member who was quoted as being critical of French policy shifts.