Guillaume Sainteny’s “The Climate that which hides the forest: How the climate issue obscures the environmental problems” (in French) is a book that challenges the focus on climate. Is the priority given today to the climate by States, NGOs, the media, it justified?
Is its place in the environmental policies not excessive? Raising this simple question appears, iconoclastic, gives off a scent of scandal and akin to a politically incorrect approach. It seems generally accepted that “combating climate change” is the mother of all environmental battles.
Let’s be clear: thousands of scientific studies have highlighted a phenomenon of climate change. However, this issue has become, since the 1990s, of such an importance that it comes not only to dominate environmental policies, but also to retract them or even to harm them. However, if climate change is undoubtedly a major environmental issue, it is not more important than the air and water pollution, , the erosion of biodiversity or land degradation. Guillaume Sainteny demonstrates (by comparing, for example, the number of premature deaths due to these phenomena), their economic costs, or even the hierarchy of the findings and recommendations of the major international organizations.
Appreciation
An excellent book that demonstrates that spending billions of Euros to a single cause, namely advocating mitigation of global warming, is not the best way to manage the planet. It should be rather to facilitate adaptation to new climate conditions, as have done mankind for thousands of years.
The political priority of limitation of the CO2 emissions does not match economic expertise as well demonstrated by B. Lomborg organizer of the Copenhagen Consensus. : climate change control policies are relegated to the bottom of 18 priorities considered by an independent panel of economists (see Falque in Futuribles No. 206, March 2005)
There is no doubt that this book will contribute to curb the political and media hysteria and replace the real environmental problems at the heart of the concerns of politics and media.
Max Falque