Since February 20, the planet has been learning to live with climate skeptic Donald Trump's annoucements. And morale is at an all-time low at the Secrétariat général à la planification ecologique (SGPE), the body responsible for implementing President Emmanuel Macron's promise that his five year term (2022-2027) "will be ecological or it won't be." In a memo to the offices of the president and the prime minister obtained by Le Monde, the SGPE warned that the trajectory of CO2 emissions are at "a turning point" in 2024, due to a "decline in emissions [which] is slowing sharply, whereas the plan is to accelerate" that decrease.
Senior civil servants, who learned three days earlier of the resignation of their boss, Antoine Pellion, are taking it hard. "We are observing an ecological backlash, with an increase in anti-environmental pressure, against the [European] Green Deal, or even the objectives of the Paris Agreement, including within the government itself," listed the note. The objectives of protecting biodiversity, combating chemical water pollution and achieving zero net artificial development are "strongly called into question," the experts continued.
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