Former French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has outed himself as a climate skeptic, joining the ranks of politicians ridiculed for their view that the planet’s accelerated warming is not caused by humans.
Sarkozy, who hopes to secure the center-right Les Republicains party’s presidential nomination, told business leaders earlier this week that “climate has been changing for four billion years” and “you need to be as arrogant as men are to believe we changed the climate”.
According to Politico.eu, his remarks have caused outrage even within his own party.
Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, a former environment minister under Sarkozy, said on France Inter radio she “regretted that he and other members of our party deny their [former] convictions on ecology”.
She also attacked current President Francois Hollande’s record on the environment, saying “we arrive at the end of a five-year mandate where nothing happened on ecology, except for the [Paris climate summit]”.
Former Green Party leader and Housing Minister Emmanuelle Cosse compared Sarkozy to US Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump, in a written statement sent to AFP on Thursday, saying the former president’s denial of climate change was “beyond indecency”.
Alain Juppe, a former prime minister a presidential hopeful, said on Thursday he was “convinced that human activity bears a heavy share of responsibility in climate change”.
“Denying it is denying reality,” he said, Le Figaro reported.
Sarkozy, who is fighting to regain the presidency that he lost to Francois Hollande in 2012, is known to have expressed his anger at the amount of global media coverage given to the climate change conference in Paris last year, that was hailed a success not just for the future of the earth but for the Socialist government who helped force through an historic deal.
According The Local—an online news publisher covering events in Western Europe with a dedicated website for France stories—Sarkozy believed the media should have been concentrating on the Paris terror attacks that occurred just weeks before on November 13th.
“The former president must have been too busy to notice the enormous amount of media coverage both in France and around the globe that was dedicated to the terror attacks,” The Local wrote in an article.
