Marine Tondelier (Bois-Bernard, 1986), the leader of the French greens, has visited València, invited by Compromís, to learn firsthand the areas affected by the Dana catastrophic on October 29, including the Natural Reserve of Lake L’Albufera. In this interview with eldiario.es, Tondelier argues that the “unforgivable is the political incompetence of having things with such lightness.”
How do you think climate denialism affects the management of catastrophes such as Dana?
Unfortunately, climate denialism exists and is very expanded among political men and women. In general, the more to the right, the more expanded. I do not say that it is forgible, but unfortunately it is common. What is unforgivable is the political incompetence of having taken things with such lightness and that is a fat political failure, which must be admitted and recognized. You have to know how to apologize in politics. So the local partners have explained me, I think it is very shocking. We will have to assume the consequences. When I find out that, today, they are regularly making decisions that will lead to the Valencians in the same situation, I think it is completely incomprehensible, because it means that we do not learn from our mistakes and that the same causes will mean the same consequences. It is a fatality.
How does the Dana phenomenon analyze from the French perspective?
I come from a province of northern France in which there were great floods a year and a half ago; There were no dead because it is a flat and little populated place, but all the crops spoiled, it was a very hard time. People ask now that they expropriate them, they know that every 20 years they will spend and ask the State to expropriate because, if they want to leave, they will not be able to sell their home and want to declare that uninhabitable area. I was a lot to see people who was not an environmentalist, like a man who had clearly voted to environmentalists in his life who told me: that’s it, I am a climate refugee. He had encountered that situation thinking that he was never going to affect him. For many people, climate change is somewhat distant in time and space, but it is here and now. You have to have the courage to look at that reality and make good decisions.
Are they inevitable?
Floods are not simply natural phenomena; I hate the expression natural catastrophe. Because there are strong rainfall every year in Valencia, but it is also a consequence of territory management. We must have the courage to say that for centuries we have had a drainage society: the tides to cultivate, channel for transportation, sometimes divert rivers to build or artificialize to make supermarkets, amazon warehouses or parking lots. They are successive decisions of man that make water today, when we fall, we know what consequences it produces.
There is an unprecedented scientific consensus in the history of the world
All scientists say it, but scientists are not heard, although it is an unprecedented scientific consensus in the history of the world. Now that there has been quite a lot to act and protect people. In France there is a lot of debate about security, but it is always about a type of security (homicides, violence), against what we have to fight, but politicians talk a lot about that and never all the rest of the security: the quality of what we eat, what we breathe and what we drink, our protection against the climatic events that will intensify and that truly, I repeat it, demand value.
Do you think an attitude of opacity would be conceivable in France like the one shown by President Carlos Mazón and the rest of the responsible for articulating the response to the catastrophe?
I think that if they had nothing to reproach, we would know where they were. The fact that we do not know that there is a problem and discomfort (and I think the word falls short). Our work as politicians is to make the truth emerge. Each can understand that, statistically, these types of catastrophes pass, but people are entitled to truth and transparency, if we do not do that we do not create conditions so that it does not happen anymore, the right lessons are not removed.
People have the right to truth and transparency
How have you seen the subsequent response to the DANA?
The political response, for what I perceive, is that the big supermarkets have been rebuilt immediately and very quickly, they are places of much money and very resilient. On the contrary, small merchants think that some will never reopen, it is the work of a lifetime that vanishes. Although they had an age close to retirement, trade could not be transmitted. It is a part of your identity that must be abandoned, it is very hard. The greats are always saved, our work of politicians is to help the little ones, whether they are merchants or neighbors. It is truly our work as politicians. Capitalism manages without politicians. I have the impression that all the means have not been put on the table to maximize the people who need it most. I think many have been able to feel abandoned.
Does the climate denialism of the extreme right consider dangerous?
They are populists and demagogues that have decided to look alone in them, as if they were stronger than climate change or the sinking of diversity: it does not concern me, it is not a problem, I am above it. It is not true. The myth of Prometheus is a bit, it is seen that it will not end well. I think we live an extremely discouraging moment when you are an environmentalist and all this is known, although I do not think there is an environmental elite and the others. I believe that the human being, deep down, we all have a part of ecology in us, is something very documented by neuroscience. It is something as brutal, and as huge as a risk, that the human brain is not equipped to apprehend such a risk.
What leads to that link between the extreme right and climate denialism?
They swing in climate denialism and eco -escopticism, anger, doubts of doubts or eco -asate. All these reactions are, even so, the fruit of an awareness. Each one expresses it in different ways, but I think that, deep down, each of us knows what is happening to us. There are some who have decided to lengthen the party until the end of the world; They say: While we can, let’s use private jets and superyates. In general, it is people with a lot of money, but they earn it mainly at the expense of the environment, exploiting resources, but also to men, women and children. All the money they obtain makes them the main taxpayers to climate change.
There is an Oxfam statistic, whose general director is the former minister of the green Cécile Duflot, which reflects an annual balance of a kind of level of what each human being could spend as a coal footprint, if divided between all humanity. 50% of the poorest of this planet uses it in three years, although it is an annual balance. The richest 1% spends it in 10 days. On January 10, 2025 they had already exhausted their quota. Bernard Arnault, the French millionaire of LVMH, only in two hours and a quarter he had exhausted his annual fee.
How does this climate inequality take advantage of the extreme right?
Needless to say, social justice and environmental justice must be put in the same place as a society. The extreme right feeds on all this, gathers anger, the capitalizes electorally without providing any solution, apart from gestures. I think that the controversy organized by Trump every day is made so that we do not discuss the bottom because, in fact, we are all trapped in this storm in which every day we must comment on a new imbecility and things that exceed understanding. I think it is a method like tennis, that you send the ball to the bottom of the track and run without stopping, without the possibility of building our game.
There is a fascist international organizing, with many media and power
What role have formations like green in that context?
Our duty is to organize better. There is a fascist international organizing, with many media and power. Before there was the altermundialist movement, very structured and organized. Today, I see that it is more complicated. In the Greens we have a very organized international network at European level with the European Green Party, we are one of the families that we work most in an integrated way worldwide. I think it is necessary to accentuate that further that, because today there is a sponator in progress, they have bought the media and power and, in part, the opinion factory. Our smiles, our good ideas and the support of scientists will not be enough.
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