Sarkozy on Climate Change and Manufactured Controversy

A little while back, I wrote about what I called the virtuous authoritarians and their tendency to shut down debate by adopting a moralistic approach and thereby labelling anyone that disagrees with them as immoral and unworthy of being heard. I gave various examples of this approach ranging from the then recent Brexit campaign to bicycle helmet laws, gun laws and holocaust denial. One topic I did not touch on was climate change and global warming.


The UK Telegraph today is reporting comment from Nicolas Sarkozy, the former and aspiring French President, headlined “Sarkozy sparks storm over claims man 'not sole cause' of climate change.” The Telegraph, a UK newspaper of a conservative bent, probably treats Sarkozy’s comments more kindly than most, actually including details of what was said. Despite this, most of the article is taken up by denouncements from Sarkozy’s political opponents. Most other newspapers have taken an even more moralistic approach and labelled Sarkozy a “cumulate change denier” or associated his comments with an appeal to the “extreme right”.

It’s worthwhile to consider the actual comments that Sarkozy made that led to such outrage. It’s been difficult to locate detailed transcripts of what was said and there are conflicting reports on where it was said. Reuters indicates that it was on a “late night talk show” whereas The Telegraph indicates that it was at a business summit. Nonetheless, digging through the confected outrage and virtue signalling of the various reports, it seems that Sarkozy’s crime was to claim that “demographic issues are a greater problem than climate change” because “the first cause of environmental degradation... is the number of people on the planet,” and that “That's very interesting but the climate has been changing for the past 4.5 billion years. Man is not the sole cause of this change.” The first of these statements should be a non-controversial opinion of relative problems being confronted and the second of the statements is objectively true. I should add that Sarkozy prefaced his remarks by noting that climate change is “a very serious challenge.”

Nonetheless, the virtue signallers were out in force. Emmanuel Cosse, the French Housing Minister got more than his share of headlines with the soundbite “Sarkozy is dragging us 15 years backwards.” Cosse is a former leader of the French Greens Party. Most newspaper headlined with words to the effect that Sarkozy was a “climate change denier”.

Leaving aside the question of how serious climate change is as a global problem (a question I plan to address in a post next week) it’s interesting to me that the Socialist party in France appears to be headed for defeat at the 2017 Presidential election. Many pundits are tipping that the Presidential runoff will be between the National Conservative Party’s Marine Le Pen, who has made quite a name for herself by opposing further immigration and Sarkozy and current polling suggests that Sarkozy would comfortably beat either Le Pen or Hollande.

I despaired for the libertarians in my previous article, but I have to say that events in France give me additional hope for the rights of free speech and the demise of the virtuous authoritarians. Like the unexpected Brexit outcome in the UK and the rise of Pauline Hanson in Australia, the likely outcome of the French presidential election will be a poke in the eye for the academic elite and a statement of purpose from the great unwashed.

The concern, for me, is that the posturing of the moralisers will push the political mainstream too far to the right and toward an unhealthy brand of nationalism. The last time this happened in Australia coincided with the last appearance of Pauline Hanson and the One Nation party. On that occasion, the Howard Liberal government’s approach was not to ridicule or moralise, but to simply hold up the policy’s of Hanson’s party for examination. Her proposed 2% “easy tax” became a laughing stock and as further policies were examined, her political credibility became less and less. I notice that Howard was in the news recently urging the media and the parliament not to isolate Hanson and her supporters.

There seems little hope of that in the current political climate where posturing and seeming are such a major component of politics. The intellectual elite, the virtue signallers and the moral authoritarians all seem to feel that their approach must be to denigrate their opponents and to shout down any opposing views without them being heard. One can only hope that they will come down from their high horses and engage in civil and considered debate.

Photo (President Obama with Russia's President Dimitry Medvedev (L), and France's President Nicolas Sarkozy (R), at the NATO Leaders Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, November 20, 2010) by The White House from Washington, DC - Crop of P112010PS-0466, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12268232