Sarkozy: Hip Hip, HOORAY!!!!

On Fri­day, I blogged over at the Green­peace web site about  the most impor­tant thing Sarkozy said at the Grenelle Pub­lic Con­sul­ta­tion on the envi­ron­ment, which to my ears sound­ed like a new French Rev­o­lu­tion:

“From now on,” he said, “every major pub­lic project, every pub­lic deci­sion will be judged on its effect on cli­mate, and on its car­bon cost. Each pub­lic deci­sion will be judged on how it affects bio-diver­si­ty. The onus won’t be on eco­log­i­cal deci­sions to prove their mer­it, but on non-eco­log­i­cal projects to prove they can’t be done any oth­er way.

Fel­low Green­peacenicks Omer and Andrew and I were in the office HOOPING when we heard those words on the BBC World report, yet I’ve seen only one news out­let, the search­less, 404-plagued EuroNews, run the quote. BBC replaced their online video piece with a cut-down, caveat-laden report about the details.

On Fri­day morn­ing I was googling every­where for it. I had the Research Unit on it. But it was when I Twit­tered on face­book that I was look­ing for it that Green­peace Vol­un­teer Extra­or­di­naire Plu­to­ni­um Page dug it up and skyped it back to me. 

Now I know there was a lot of ground­break­ing stuff com­ing out of the con­fer­ence: from the ban on GMOs to the (was it a?) freeze on new nuclear pow­er plant con­struc­tion to the 50% reduc­tion in pes­ti­cide use over 10 years.  Nicky at the office opined “this hap­pens again and again — if we can get a right-wing gov­ern­ment to actu­al­ly focus on this stuff, they often do a bet­ter job than the left.” And I too was impressed how Sarkozy man­aged to take a nor­mal­ly unpalat­able sow’s ear of an issue for eco­nom­ic con­ser­v­a­tives and spin up a silk purse: shift­ing the tax base to focus less on income and more on car­bon is just smart, and levy­ing import duties on coun­tries which don’t imple­ment Kyoto (Bon­jour Aus­tralia! Ne quit­tez pas, Amer­i­ca!) was bril­liant.

But all of that is con­se­quence of the core mes­sage, and I found it dis­turbing that the core mes­sage seemed to get lost in the report­ing.

Where is the Fourth Estate when we real­ly need them? This is a G8 Gov­ern­ment declar­ing a basic prin­ci­ple that Green­peace and oth­er envi­ron­men­tal­ists have been demand­ing for decades: an “Earth First,” pre­cau­tion­ary-approach-informed approach to gov­er­nance.

This is the kind of  vic­to­ry that all of us in the envi­ron­men­tal move­ment should be shout­ing from the rooftops.  But what’s out there in the blo­gos­phere? 12 hits on “Sarkozy, Grenelle” in Tech­no­rati, and only a hand­ful of those are rel­e­vant com­ment.

La Vie Vert alone seems to get it.  Grist dis­miss­es it as a “smat­ter­ing of green ini­tia­tives” and then kiss­es off their arti­cle with a dis­tinct­ly Amer­i­can sneer, Tree­hug­ger gives a cau­tious nod, only to be lam­bast­ed in the com­ment sec­tion by Sarkozy’s pro-busi­ness ori­en­ta­tion as proof he could nev­er be a lefty,  Poli­tique just thumbs its nose at Sarkozy AND Gore. 

When one of the world’s lead­er reads direct­ly from the script we’ve been wav­ing in their faces for near­ly 30 years, I per­son­al­ly think we ought to do more than give them faint applause.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: envi­ron­ment, ecol­o­gy, sarkozy, grenelle