In the winter of 1988, Brice Lalonde made his first official trip outside Europe to Boulder, Colorado, in the United States. In this pristine setting where the Great Plains meet the Rocky Mountains, the newly-appointed French secretary of state for the environment took part in a conference organized by the American weekly magazine Time. There, he rubbed shoulders with Al Gore, future American vice president and fervent environmentalist, as well as eminent scientists from all over the world gathered to find solutions to a problem that was emerging in the public and political debate: climate change.
A few months earlier, the US had suffered a historic heatwave and NASA's chief climatologist, James Hansen, had alerted Congress to the reality of man-made global warming. Time awarded its Person of the Year award to a planet, "The Endangered Earth," illustrating its cover with a globe wrapped in plastic and rope created by the artist Christo. "I was already convinced of the urgency of climate change, but after this conference, I decided to focus France's environmental policy on the fight against climate change," Lalonde told Le Monde.
This event marked the emergence of France's ambitious climate policy, driven by the former environmental activist and by the prime minister of the time, socialist Michel Rocard, at the crossroads of ecological concerns and nuclear interests.
But France's plans to limit greenhouse gas emissions and introduce a European carbon tax were ultimately derailed in 1992 due to intense lobbying efforts from employers' organizations led by the fossil fuel industry, and by the emergence of another duo: Pierre Bérégovoy and Dominique Strauss-Kahn. These four pivotal years from 1988 to 1992, during which France missed an opportunity to take action, are chronicled in a study published in the French historical review 20 & 21. Revue d'Histoire.
"I wanted to explore a very short but pivotal moment in time when humanity could have limited global warming, thanks to the stars being aligned in the run-up to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit," explained science historian Christophe Bonneuil, research director at the Center for Historical Research (in partnership with France's National Center for Scientific Research and the EHESS School). While the American version of this story has already been told in journalist Nathaniel Rich's book Losing Earth: A Recent History (2019), Bonneuil used newly opened archives to delve into this subject from a French and European perspective.
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