⌛Weekly Dispatch - Preparing For The Future
⌛Weekly Dispatch - Preparing For The Future
21 May 2023 - The Government is preparing for a 4°C rise, Macron announces world-class medical investment, Morez hopes he made an impact, and Martens Bilongo holds on to social housing
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This week
🌎Government is preparing for a 4°C rise
🔬Macron announces world-class medical investment
👋Yannick Morez hopes he made an impact
💰 Carlos Martens Bilongo holds on to social housing
🌎Government is preparing for a 4°C rise
It’s a sunny day in much of Europe as you sip your coffees and read
. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and the French government has launched a consultation to prepare for a 4°C rise in global temperaturesOkay, slightly pessimistic, but there’s a good reason for this, and it’s not all doom and gloom.
As said for months now by Christophe Béchu, the Minister for Ecological Transition and Cohesion of the Territories, France must “come out of its denial” and start preparing for the possibility of global temperatures increasing by 4°C by the end of the century.
This is why, starting on Tuesday 23 May, the government will launch a public consultation based on this hypothesis and the resulting consequences for the French population, the French economy, and local authorities.
Two scenarios have been proposed as part of this consultation: an increase of +2°C and +4°C in global temperatures, with one being based on compliance with the Paris Agreement (keeping temperature increases under +2°C)
Unfortunately, these seem fanciful, with the 2022 UN Emissions Gap Report having already declared that there is “no credible pathway to [a] 1.5°C” increase and that we’re on track for a +2.4°C to +2.6°C increase if State 2030 climate commitments are kept.
With wildfires having raged across Europe last year and the ongoing concerns of serious drought across France and the rest of the continent, the impacts of climate change are already more than evident and will only worsen.
But it’s for this very reason that the government wants to involve the citizenry more, to help them understand what is coming, get them involved in potential ways of managing the situation, and start workshopping future policies.
The Ministry of Ecology wants to begin working on reference trajectories for dealing with the global warming crisis, enabling it to better understand what is happening and how effective its efforts are in dealing with it.
🔬Macron announces world-class medical investment
Moving on from the doom and gloom, we have some excellent news on the medical side of things.
Visiting the Institut Curie Foundation for cancer research on Tuesday, President Emmanuel Macron announced the creation of 12 new IHU’s (Instituts Hospitalo-Universitaires) training and research centres and 4 new research ‘bioclusters’.
For the uninitiated, a biocluster is a grouping of research centres, care centres, companies and laboratories in the health field.
Six of the new IHUs are based in Paris, and Le Parisien announced that one is being led jointly by the European Leukemia Institute and the Paris-Cité University Foundation and is working to “radically transform the prognosis of leukaemia, or even eradicate it”
The IHUs are working on everything from leukaemia to Chronic liver diseases, gene therapies, and more by developing a stronger understanding and innovative therapies to deal with these.
The goal here is to ultimately “bring French excellence to the world level”, according to the Elysée, with health receiving a huge €7 billion investment as part of the €54 billion “France 2030” plan.
👋Yannick Morez hopes he made an impact
Following on from the previous story regarding Yannick Morez, the Mayor of Saint-Brévin-les-Pins who quit his job due to months of threats and attempt to kill him and his wife, Matignon stepped into the fight to convince him to do otherwise.
The Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, had invited Morez to speak with her on Wednesday after asking the prefect of Loire-Atlantique not to accept this resignation until this meeting.
However, perhaps to protect Borne’s reputation and avoid being tagged with disappointment, her entourage declared that the meeting was not aimed at changing the former Mayor’s mind.
Luckily, as she very clearly didn’t.
On top of having previously declared that the “state did not stand by [his] side” when he faced the overwhelming harassment that culminated in an attempt to burn the mayor’s house with him and his wife inside.
However, after years of increasingly violent behaviour towards elected officials, the government is using the former Mayor’s resignation to increase the protections for Mayors and the punishments for those threatening them.
The former Mayor has said in the past few weeks that he hopes that his resignation would prove to be a catalyst for change and that it made an impact in the grand scheme of things.
And fortunately, this seems to be the case.
Dominique Faure, the Minister for Local Authorities, announced an increase of the penalties for attacks on officials, increasing imprisonment terms from three to seven years and fines from €75,000 to €100,000.
However, these still need to be integrated into a future bill on justice. The big question is whether this kind of bill would make it through the legislative process and whether or not the opposition would not return to aggressive tactics to block this.
Most notably, this kind of bill could penalise those who take an incredibly aggressive stance when protesting against the current government, which would be a red line for members of the NUPES coalition and the Rassemblement National.
💰 Carlos Martens Bilongo holds on to social housing
And let’s end this with a public interest story that has set tongues wagging across France.
With La France Insoumise frequently declaring itself as the defender of France's ordinary working men and women, you’d think that they would do everything to ensure that everything made to help them was left to these people.
However, an ongoing investigation is beginning to unveil some problematic information concerning Deputy Carlos Martens Bilongo (LFI), on top of potentially failing to declare almost €200,000, holding onto social housing and benefiting from it.
Already under preliminary investigation for tax evasion, laundering of tax evasion, misuse of corporate assets and breach of reporting obligations to the High Authority for the Transparency of Public Life (HATVP), it seems things are going from bad to worse.
It has come out that, despite owning two apartments since 2018, he has been holding onto an apartment in northern Paris meant for social housing and has been subletting this to his sister.
Unfortunately, this is not the first time a deputy from La France Insoumise has been caught benefiting from social housing.
The Danielle Simonnet affair blew up when it came out that the Deputy and Paris Councillor, Danielle Simonnet, had been holding onto an apartment that she had been holding onto an 83m2 that was rented to her at rates 30-40% below market prices.
Her defence was that she did not want to "live in the private sector, enrich a private owner and participate in real estate speculation", but this kind of argumentation is a cold comfort to the thousands who wait for social housing in France.
With deputies usually receiving a very healthy indemnity, which as of 1st January 2023 is set at €8,472.16, on top of other allowances, these situations are very often a good barometer of the moral fibre of the representatives of the French people.
However, as we know, all investigations must be carried to the end of the process before we can make any declarations on the reality of the situation.
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