Happy Nice Mall

MONTARGIS, France – It separates this provincial town just 75 miles from Paris, but if the capital is all about a renewable energy revolution, the talk here is how much it’s costing people.

“We want to go very fast,” said Jean-Pierre Door, a conservative MP with a large number of angry voters. “People are pushing their limits”

Three years ago, Montargis became the center of the Yellow Vests social upheaval, a protest movement angry, sometimes violent, against the increase in gasoline taxes for more than a year. a much broader sense of alienation It was felt by those in remote areas, which France calls the “periphery”.

The uprising was rooted in a class divide that revealed the resentment of many working classes, whose livelihoods were threatened by the clean energy transition, against the metropolitan elite, particularly in Paris, who could afford electric cars and cycle to work. unlike those in the countryside.

Now as Mr. Door and others Watch ongoing global climate talks in GlasgowIn a place where experts and officials have warned of the need for immediate action in the face of an impending environmental disaster, the economic and political disconnect that nearly tore France three years ago lies just below the surface.

There are many people who understand the need for a clean energy transition “around” and are already trying to do their part. But if the theme COP26As the Glasgow summit is known, how time is running out to save the planet, the immediate concern here is how the money is running out before the end of the month.

House gas prices rose 12.6 percent in the last month alone, in part as a result of coronavirus-related shortages. Electric cars seem imaginatively expensive to people who were encouraged to buy fuel-efficient diesel cars not so long ago. A wind turbine that will reduce property values ​​is not what a retired couple wants just down the road.

“If Parisians love wind turbines so much, why don’t you dismantle the Bois de Vincennes and turn them into an attraction?” asked Magali Cannault, who lives near Montargis, referring to the vast park east of Paris.

The transition to clean energy has become a sensitive issue for President Emmanuel Macron, who faces an election in April. He has portrayed himself as a green warrior, albeit pragmatically, but knows that a return to the Yellow Vests’ barricades will be disastrous for his electoral hopes.

Every morning at her farm a few miles from town, Ms. Cannault looks out of her door at a recently built 390-foot mast to measure the wind levels of the proposed turbines. “No one consulted us about it”

On a foggy, humid morning, the only sounds he spoke were the horns of geese and the crowing of roosters. Claude Madec-Cleï, the mayor of the nearby village of Griselles, nodded. “We’re not being evaluated,” he said. “President Macron is courting the Greens.”

In fact, as the election approaches, Mr. Macron is courting almost everyone and is desperate to prevent the Yellow Vests from returning.

The government has frozen household gas prices. An “energy check” worth $115 will be sent next month to the nearly six million people deemed to need it most. The same amount of “inflation compensation” will be sent to the nearly 38 million people earning less than $2,310 a month. Gasoline inflation has been the main driver of these measures.

Sophie Tissier, who organized more than a hundred Yellow Vest rallies, said the harsh response by police “made it very difficult to restart the movement” despite what she described as a “grave social crisis and widespread anger”. He added that inequalities in France are so extreme that they “prevent us from making an ecological transition.”

The president speaks to the realism of energy proposals. They combine the development of new small-reactor nuclear power with wind power and other renewable energy sources.

To its left, the Green movement seeks the phasing out of nuclear power, which supplies 67.1 percent of France’s electricity needs; This is such a colossal arrangement that conservatives deride it as the herald of a “return to the candlelight age.”

To Mr Macron’s right, Marine Le Pen supports the dismantling of the country’s more than 9,000 wind turbines, which account for 7.9 percent of France’s electricity production.

In the middle, millions of French struggle to adapt, torn between concern for the planet and their urgent need.

Christine Gobet drives her little diesel car approximately 90 miles a day from the Montargis region to her job at an Amazon warehouse on the outskirts of Orléans, where she packs and makes about $1,600 per month.

Sitting behind the wheel outside a garage where his diesel engine had just been replaced for about $3,000, he mocked the idea of ​​switching to an electric car.

“For people like me, electricity is out of the question,” he said. “Everything is going well, even more expensive baguettes are mentioned! We were pushed to Diesel, we were told it was less polluting. Now we have been told the opposite.”

He attended demonstrations in Montargis at the beginning of the Yellow Vest movement. It wasn’t just the financial pressure that was pushing him. It was the feeling that “we are not being listened to, it is the elite on top who make the decisions and we just suffer the consequences”.

He left the movement when it turned violent. On the edge of Montargis, in a traffic circle known as the “peanut roundabout” because of its shape, traffic was locked for two months and stores were out of stock.

Today, it feels like little has changed. In Paris, “they have everything,” he said. Anne Hidalgo, mayor of Paris and a socialist candidate for president, wants “no more cars in the city and no time for people who go from the provinces to work there.”

For working-class people like Mrs Gobet, who is featured in the 100-episode series “Pieces of France” in Le Monde, she’s urging Glasgow to stop using fossil fuels and shutting down nuclear power plants seems wildly far from them. daily lives.

At 58, he shows a generation gap. The world’s youth, led by Greta Thunberg, are convinced on one side that no priority is more urgent than saving the planet. On the other hand, there are older people who, as Mr. Door puts it, “don’t want the last 20 years of their lives to be ruined by environmental measures that raise energy prices and increase the value of the house they put their money on.”

The area around Montargis has attracted many immigrants living on the outskirts of the city, as well as many retirees who want to be close to Paris without paying Parisian prices.

Taxi driver Gilles Fauvin, driving a diesel Peugeot, was in the same garage as Mrs. Gobet. He said much of his job comes from taking clients with medical needs to hospitals in Orléans and Paris. Plans to ban diesel cars from the capital by 2024 and pressure to switch to expensive electric cars could ruin it. “Diesel works for me,” he said.

But of course diesel cars produce various pollutants. For Yoann Fauvin, the garage owner and the taxi driver’s cousin, the question is whether electric cars really are any better.

“For batteries in China or Chile you have to extract the metals, you have to transport them with all the carbon costs, you have to recycle the batteries,” he said.

In front, a classic green 1977 Citroen 2CV was being refurbished and a diesel Citroen DS4 was being repaired. “This business lives on diesel,” he said. “Energy conversion is being laughed at around here. It’s rich people who are switching to electric cars, people who don’t understand what’s going on here.”

Housewife Magalie Pasquier, president of a local association against wind energy called Aire 45, said her opposition to the nearly 75 new turbines planned for the area had nothing to do with dismissing environmental concerns.

He is recycling. He is careful about travel. He’s making compost. Instead of raising the fever, he’s wearing two sweaters. He finds the environmental idealism of young people inspiring. But he believes the world puts the cart before the horse.

“Why destroy a landscape that draws people to this region when the real energy problem is overconsumption?” asked. “Locals are not consulted and not even mayors can afford to stop these ugly turbines.”

A friend of his named Philippe Jacob, a management and marketing professor who was also involved in the movement against turbines, said the Yellow Vest movement was driven by rising gasoline prices, falling purchasing power, worsening utilities, and widespread dissatisfaction with top-down decision-making. .

The same is true today, and the situation is very dangerous,” he said. “When people say they have invested their savings here, and planned turbines and biogas power plants will mean the area will be destroyed, no one listens.”