Hot issues awaiting the new Prime Minister on the environment

Reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, energy policy, adaptation to the climate crisis… Michel Barnier will have to decide on many questions that have remained pending for several months.

He promised during the handover on Thursday September 5 at Matignon to say “the truth” on the “ecological debt that weighs heavily on the shoulders of our children.” And this is one of the big issues that awaits Michel Barnier at Matignon: the environment. With many questions that have remained unanswered for months.

Starting with a crucial question about the future of France’s energy policy. It will be necessary to clear up the uncertainty that has reigned for months and detail the multi-year energy programming. More than a year late. It must define the entire French strategy on its electricity production. On this point, Michel Barnier and Emmanuel Macron seem aligned, both campaigning for nuclear power, “sovereign advantage”, said the new Prime Minister in 2021.

Another major issue on the agenda is the national low-carbon strategy, to detail how France will reduce its greenhouse gas emissions: renovation of buildings, decarbonization of industry, deployment of electric cars, CO2 capture… so many sectors to adapt or even create in a short time frame. Objective: half as many emissions by 2030.

Finally, what to do with the national plan for adaptation to climate change, with its unprecedented ambition? It is ready, awaiting publication, “on the desk” Michel Barnier, Gabriel Attal told his successor on Thursday, there are also many challenges to be met: from coastal erosion to heat waves… this plan must launch France’s adaptation to a warming of 4 degrees by the end of the century.

Michel Barnier says he is against any ecology “punitive”he said it and repeated it, notably in a column in The Worldin 2023. Michel Barnier criticizes the environmental policy of the European Union: ban on new thermal cars in 2035, halving of pesticides by 2030, law on the restoration of nature. “Injunctions with considerable consequences for agriculture, crafts and industry”criticizes the Prime Minister. He wants “more freedom” left to the States.

Michel Barnier, Minister of the Environment in the 90s, the subject was not as central, but he gave his name to the Barnier law, the first to establish the general principles of environmental law: the precautionary principle or that of the polluter pays.

As for his time at the Ministry of Agriculture under Nicolas Sarkozy, the environmental protection association Générations futures remembers a minister who knew how to “resisting pressure from the FNSEA” during the Grenelle pesticides negotiations. The NGO is now calling on Michel Barnier to carry out a thorough overhaul of agricultural and environmental policies.