The awakening is brutal at the end of the two Covid years which have seriously tested the organizations and the morale of the French. We thought we could breathe a little during this summer, finally move on to something else.
It was without counting, at first, on the war started in Ukraine by Putin, generating fear and destruction. A conflict with immediate effect on our daily lives, from the explosion of fuel prices to the disappearance of jars of mustard from supermarket shelves. War is no longer an abstraction, far from us in space and time, but a reality knocking at our doors.
Then there was this record heat wave that hit the country. Suddenly, the forests started to burn, in Gironde and elsewhere. The drought has drained our rivers. And the heat wave episodes never stop bouncing, installing an idea in everyone’s mind, as an obvious fact that imposes itself on us: climate change is now.
Extreme heat and fires occupy a large part of the conversations of the French, explains Véronique Reille-Soult, the president of Backbone Consulting: testimonials, practical information, and above all questions and fears are expressed on social networks. The citizens are won over by the growing feeling of heading towards a catastrophe. And the younger you are, the more anxious you are about climate peril and public inaction.
We are facing an unprecedented phenomenon of “endless crisis”, as identified by Bruno Cautrès in The Political Review, this feeling of constantly moving from one emergency to another. According to the political scientist-researcher at Cevipof, politicians explain each time that they have anticipated, that they are taking the necessary measures. But as the crises follow one another, it is a feeling of confusion and fear that takes over. Our decision-makers are struggling to prioritize the responses and the means to be implemented, because everything is on fire at the same time…
Awareness of the climatic danger, which suddenly appeared this summer, is therefore very real. But we face a paradox, always the same: society remains a prisoner of the short term. Earn a good living, fill the tank of your car, make ends meet… Until the equation “end of the month versus end of the world” is resolved in our minds, we will go into the wall without being able to change. the future.