The head of state said he wanted to say “that basically” the crisis has arrived “even faster than expected”.
“I was misunderstood”. In a video published Tuesday, January 17, on his Youtube channel, in which he answers questions from the French on ecology, Emmanuel Macron returned to a sentence uttered during his wishes for 2023: “who could have predicted the climate crisis?”. The statement immediately provoked a lot of criticism, annoying scientists among others.
“They wanted me to say that, basically, I would never have read any IPCC report. What did I simply want to say? It is that basically it has been even faster than expected,” the president defended himself. “Even all those who, for years, have been warning about the collapse of biodiversity, about climate disruption, have said ‘look, last summer, it’s going even faster than we predicted and we’re even more affected than we expected’. I didn’t want to say anything more,” he continued.
“I have the feeling that there has been a lot of bad faith,” he added, deploring that they wanted to “caricature it as a message of denial”. “It is not very credible as an attack”, “it has been years that we act”, finally pleaded the head of the State, who assures however “to hear the criticisms, always”, and says to share “the pressure to make more”.