Jean-Marc Jancovici is a very influential figure in French environmentalism. He passes for a moderate, having nothing to do with the blue-haired lunatics who vandalize paintings in museums, nor with the enrages who call for the sabotage of the energy industry.
One could therefore believe that he is very attached to individual freedoms and does not intend to sacrifice them in the essential fight against climate change.
Error.
Passing through the morning of France inter, one of the most important radio meetings in France, he pleaded for a radical limitation of the right to travel by plane.
His proposal: individuals should be entitled to 4 plane trips in their lifetime.
Beyond that, they would apparently endanger the planet.
This proposal is not new. Only a few years ago, we heard it on the margins of public debate, but no sane person would have dared to take it up.
Despise freedoms
This would have been seen as the expression of a staggering contempt for freedoms.
It is no longer so.
How can we not see that some influential ecologists dream of a form of global confinement that does not say its name, that of a humanity under house arrest where everyone would potentially be locked up in their village or neighborhood and would no longer really have the right to out without permission.
We would then switch to a society of bureaucratic control where individuals would be on file, with a license with points to move around or to carry out the various daily activities.
“Centrist” environmentalism, that of bourgeois leaders who speak of global governance, no longer hides its authoritarian temptation.
And he doesn’t just want to limit air travel.
Other important figures propose limiting car travel, or meat consumption.
This environmentalism wants to limit the number of cows per country because of the methane they emit and may require us tomorrow to convert to veganism.
He wants to limit the number of children per woman to limit the ecological footprint of each other.
To save the planet, he wants to put humanity under guardianship, in a model that is reminiscent of Chinese social credit.
Everyone would travel with their climate passport. We guess that the nomenklatura of this green society would not submit itself to these constraints, reserved for the great number.
We find here a model that is reminiscent of the socialism of the twentiethe century. He claimed to liberate humanity from bondage and capitalism, and for this he condemned the societies he seized to bureaucratic hell.
Freedoms
Today, to save the planet, he proposes a green technocratic collectivism, an anthill society under surveillance.
Yet it is the marvelous human creativity that generates the technology that will make it possible to adapt to the climate crisis.
This does not mean that our societies will not have to demonstrate a new sobriety, but that they do not have, for that, to transform themselves into supervised camps for people to re-educate.