The world is burning, but who notices?
Heat waves and forest fires are just a foretaste of the global warming that’s already, perhaps irreversibly, upon us. But France is in the vanguard of change.
When the Tour de France bicycle race rolled into the ancient walled city of Carcassonne to wind up its 15th stage on Sunday, the temperature hovered just under 100 degrees. Tour organizers allowed the riders extra drinks en route, but the 202.5-kilometer course was brutal.
On Monday and Tuesday, triple digit temperatures of 103 and 104 degrees respectively are forecast to reach Paris where air conditioning is still only sporadic. And Madrid will be surging above 100 degrees every day this week except for a brief respite of 96 on Tuesday. In Portugal, there was a July all-time record of 116 degrees.
Europe is in the grip of what the French euphoniously call a “canicule,” or in English simply a heat wave. But of literally unprecedented proportions. And the consequences have been equally catastrophic and exceptional. In the Galicia region of northwestern Spain, forest fires leveled nearly 9,000 acres while the nation suffered at least 360 deaths from the heat with 123 on Friday alone. In France, two forest fires destroyed nearly 25,000 acres of forest in the Gironde region with 1,200 firefighters called in to control the blazes.
Britain declared a first-ever “red” warning of extreme heat, with “risk to life” and closed schools. Then of course for the rest of the year there are the hurricanes, tornados, and floods, rising sea levels and extinction of species that are wreaking their own climate-related havoc around the globe.
The problem is the same in the United States as in Europe. Here, forest fires and extreme heat have become a way of life every summer, while starting ever earlier into the Spring and extending ever further each year into the Fall. Yet for all too many government officials in Washington, not to mention that voters that installed them in office, there is an all but total disconnect between these climatic and environmental events and the reality that our planet is quite simply cooking itself to death—and increasingly we along with it. And this is just the beginning.
The difference between Europe and America, however, is the approach governments on both sides of the Atlantic are taking. The Biden administration seems to have thrown up its hands in defeat in the wake of nominally Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, clearly in the hip pocket of the coal industry of his state of West Virginia, deciding that he would not support a major climate bill that 49 of his fellow senators said they’d approve. In an evenly divided Senate, that was a death-knell to a measure that would have been at least a baby-step toward confronting a tsunami that is threatening our planet. One man has chosen to weigh in on the side of an industry that single-handedly is doing more than any other to warm our planet to the breaking the point.
The French, however, are more realistic. Many of my friends and relatives in Paris eschew air conditioning on the grounds that “oh it’s never this hot in the summer” (which of course it is every year). Indeed, when I purchased the best portable a/c I could find for my little garret pied-a-terre in Paris, I discovered that it acquitted itself quite nicely up to about 90 degrees outside, then past that threw up its metaphorical hands and let me bake. But the French government at least is undertaking some serious measures to control the use of carbon-based fuels in these critical times.
French president Emmanuel Macron has announced his intention to have the state-owned energy provider EDF build and operate at least six new small-scale nuclear reactors. At the same time as his announcement of the new plants, he said he’s planning to extend the lifespan of existing facilities to at least 50 years from the current 40 years.
Indeed, France is already the world’s most nuclearized country, and this initiative will only cement its place. But Macron is prepared to go even further toward making his country a global leader in carbon neutrality. He also wants to accelerate the development of solar and offshore wind power—increasing tenfold the nation’s solar generating capacity to 100 gigawatts and building 50 offshore wind farms with a total capacity of at least 40 gigawatts, all by 2050.
Macron is also taking a leadership role for Europe. Part of this sprang from his rotating six-month presidency of the Council of the European Union which he held from January through June this year. The EU has had a series of ambitious goals that Macron encouraged during his leadership moment—despite its eclipse by the war in Ukraine and the pandemic that has been a persistent undercurrent. The EU has targeted some ambitious goals for carbon neutrality by mid-century, weaning itself especially from imported Russian oil and gas. This goal has only been made more urgent and immediate by the need to deprive Vladimir Putin of the petroleum revenues financing his war machine that he has turned on neighboring Ukraine.
But the DNA of leadership in reshaping the climate calculus is deeply ingrained in France’s leadership. After all, it was Laurent Fabius who as foreign minister presided over the landmark COP-21 UN Climate Change Conference at Le Bourget field outside Paris in 2015. I was there, watching as Fabius so adroitly held the feet of any number of heads of state to the fire—working them through the night to arrive finally at a pact that, had it been adhered to, would have been likely to achieve its ultimate goal.
This agreement included a pledge to hold the increase in the global average temperature to “well below 2 degrees Centigrade above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Centigrade, recognizing that this would significantly reduce risks and impacts of climate change.” Fabius, incidentally, is now the president of the Conseil Constitutionnel—France’s Supreme Court.
There have been any number of excuses as to why this COP-21 target has come a cropper—impossible to achieve, despite an ever-accumulating number of indications about how essential it is. Never more so than this summer, indeed at this very moment. Yet in the seven intervening years, there have been no leaders of the stature of Fabius to shepherd the successive COP climate summits. Last year’s COP-26 in Glasgow was headed by Alok Sharma as point man, with Boris Johnson from the get-go seeking to manage already decidedly diminished expectations. Sharma, a Conservative Member of Parliament and chartered accountant from Reading West, has none of the international stature of Fabius who had served as France’s youngest prime minister and was the incumbent foreign minister at the time of COP-21. Moreover, there was the leak of a government document just before the start of COP-26 suggesting that the Boris Johnson Conservative government was determined to prioritize economic growth over environmental protection at any cost. This was hardly likely to promote much in the way of a revolutionary consensus. Putting a final stake through the heart of COP-26 was an absence of the leaders from two of the world’s most flagrant polluters—China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
The text of the COP-26 agreement “represents the least-worst outcome,” James Shaw, New Zealand’s climate minister observed. Hardly a resounding endorsement, but one seconded by most of his fellow delegates. The reality is that Covid recovery has cost the world some $16 trillion, barely 2% of which went to any clean energy projects. And while the U.S. has now rejoined the global climate process after Donald Trump withdrew in an ill-considered huff, there has been little real progress in moving toward any sense of carbon neutrality.
As U.N. Secretary General António Guterres told the closing session in Glasgow, “it is time to go into emergency mode,” which he promptly defined as ending fossil fuel subsidies, phasing out coal, placing a price on carbon and its uses, and delivering on a $100 billion climate finance commitment. Of course, even that would represent barely 0.6% of what the world spent on dealing with Covid in less than two years.
So, fire fighters continue their battle to save 2,000-year-old sequoias from Yosemite’s Washburn fire that has scorched some 4,700 acres and is still not under control. Eleven thousand residents have been evacuated as forest fires moved closer to inhabited towns in the south of France with 3,000 fire fighters battling to save them. And the worst is without doubt still to come.