Nicolas Hulot has been a minister in Édouard Philippe's government for just a few months. Journalist and man of institutions: here is what he proposes to do for the environment.
Nicolas Hulot is France's new environment minister. After being courted for years by governments of both the right and the left, never agreeing to join any of them, he decided to enter the executive led by the conservative Édouard Philippe, under the presidency of the centrist Emmanuel Macron. Hulot is a deep connoisseur of French politics: for years he took part in and led programmes, initiatives and government-linked think tanks, always assuming a politically "cross-party" role, open to compromise.
Sixty-two years old and born in Lille, a long-time journalist, presenter and passionate traveller, Nicolas Hulot first studied medicine at university (for just a few months) before deciding to abandon his studies and devote himself to photojournalism for the press agency Sipa. That work took him around the world, eventually leading him to the radio broadcaster France Inter, where he presented numerous adventure programmes. In the 1980s he made his first television appearances, achieving his greatest public success in particular with a programme called "Ushuaia Nature".
In 1990 he set up his own foundation, known since 1995 as the Nicolas Hulot Foundation for Nature and Man, through which he would take part in numerous initiatives that brought him closer to politics. In 2002 he accepted for the first time the role of environmental adviser to President Jacques Chirac: for the conservative leader — who went down in history as the president of nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific atolls — he would write the speech delivered at the Johannesburg Earth Summit in September of that year.
It was in this context that the prime minister of the time, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, offered him the position of environment minister for the first time — an offer Hulot declined. Referring to politics, the journalist did not seem particularly optimistic: "I am an optimist by nature and a pessimist by reason. I feel as though I am on a commercial airliner going down while people keep popping champagne corks." An attitude that would culminate in the publication of a book ("How many more catastrophes before we act?") and a film ("The Titanic syndrome"), both with telling titles.
In 2006, he called on the main candidates for the following year's presidential election to commit to an "ecological pact": the conservative Nicolas Sarkozy, the socialist Ségolène Royal, the centrist François Bayrou and the communist Marie-George Buffet all accepted its contents. Sarkozy would be the first to become president and to fail to honour what he had signed. Even so, in 2007 Hulot took part in a fresh initiative with right-wing prime minister Alain Juppé, again with scant results.
For a genuine victory, the French journalist would have to wait until 2015, when, in his capacity as "Special Envoy of the President of the Republic" François Hollande to the United Nations Climate Conference (COP21), he played a particularly important role in "stitching together" the differences between various countries in order to reach a point of agreement that resulted in the signing of the Paris Agreement.
Hulot's path and approach have therefore always been particularly "institutional" in character, and this has also earned him some criticism. Recently, the weekly Le Canard Enchaîné published an investigation into his foundation, from which it emerges that the foundation also receives funding from numerous companies that have been in the crosshairs of French environmentalists for decades. In particular, €100,000 a year from energy giant EDF and €200,000 a year from construction group Vinci. EDF is precisely the company managing the construction of the new EPR reactors at Flamanville in Normandy, at Hinkley Point in the United Kingdom and at Olkiluoto in Finland, which have attracted particularly sharp criticism for the scandals, exorbitant costs and delays accumulated.
Even so, Hulot launched his experience in the Philippe government with a particularly ambitious environmental programme. Among the main pillars of his "climate plan" are the introduction of incentives for the purchase of clean vehicles "with a view to halting the sale of petrol or diesel cars by 2040", funding allocations to "solve within ten years" the problem of energy-inefficient buildings, the closure "by 2022" of coal-powered energy production, the achievement of "carbon neutrality" by 2050, a halt to new concessions for the exploitation of oil and gas, and a reduction of the share of nuclear energy production to 50 per cent by 2025 (currently between 75 and 80 per cent). To achieve this, Hulot has proposed closing "up to 17 reactors" (out of the 58 currently operating in France).
The programme was received with caution by NGOs, which are calling above all for "a move from announcements to concrete action." Many have pointed out, for example, that the promises on nuclear energy are the same ones François Hollande had already made in 2012. Meanwhile Greenpeace believes that closing 17 reactors cannot be enough: "Between 27 and 31 will need to be shut down. And until that happens, renewable sources will not be developed adequately: Hulot is continuing with the same methodological error as previous governments." "On the other hand," Charlotte Mijeon of the network Sortir du nucléaire explained to the ecology daily Reporterre, "we have a prime minister who spent years working at Areva…" — that is, at one of the main players in France's nuclear sector.
Furthermore, while the few coal-fired power stations still operating in France are set to close, nothing has been said about the 46 that the two state giants EDF and Engie own around the world, responsible on their own for emissions of 151 million tonnes of CO2 per year: roughly half the total pollution produced by the European country within its own borders. The Réseau Action Climat, finally, has highlighted the lack of attention given to the subject of the financial transactions tax, on which President Macron himself appears to be playing for time.