Emmanuel Macron on France 24: The Summit for a New Global Financial Pact, a feeling of déjà vu?
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00:00 back to you at the Palace. If you have seen the film Don't Look Up,
00:03 the Leonardo DiCaprio frustration looking up at the heavens to think
00:06 what can I do, if you step back from this, you have Antonio Guterres,
00:10 the head of the United Nations, the Secretary-General, saying it is all
00:14 well and good, even post Paris 2015 climate agreement, but actually it
00:18 is pitiful what has happened in the eight years since. We are hurtling
00:21 towards climate disaster. In the meantime, they are talking about
00:24 changing things financially to help the poorer nations, ticking along
00:28 with the climate summit. The next COP summit is in the UAE, to which
00:32 one of the hosts runs the state oil companies. This is very
00:36 complicated. It is hardly let's take action now, is it? No, but I guess
00:44 the nuts and bolts of getting things done are rather complicated. Yet
00:48 you are right, there is this sense of deja vu, because every summit we
00:53 hear people saying we need to do more, the time has come, we need to
00:57 do more, we need to do faster, and global temperatures keep on rising.
01:00 It is extremely frustrating and I can understand why members of the
01:04 public get frustrated as well, because we hear the climate warnings, we
01:07 see the examples of extreme weather, we see the leaders coming together
01:11 and agreeing with warm words that they need to do more about it, and yet
01:16 it is very complicated to get these things done. I think what Emmanuel
01:21 Macron would say is that this is what this summit is about. It is about
01:24 getting the nuts and bolts of the greenhouse gas tax and saying in
01:28 order to invest in wind farms in Africa, in order to get private
01:31 finance there, we need to do something about the massive interest rates
01:34 that they would pay on such an investment because of the risk
01:38 involved. Let's get the World Bank and the IMF to financially take on
01:42 some of that risk. It can appear frustrating, it can appear that we
01:47 are hearing the same messages again and the time is rolling on, but at
01:50 the same time, I think there are some concrete proposals coming out of
01:54 places like this, where they are saying, concretely, what can we do?
01:59 Someone who has been at the heart of that as well is the Prime Minister
02:03 of Barbados, we have spoken about her as well, who has come up with
02:06 this Bridgetown initiative a while back, and really saying, what can we
02:10 actually do about it? Let's get these SDRs, these special drawing rights,
02:13 these assets held by the IMF, and let's reattribute them to other
02:17 countries, and increase climate investment. There are things going
02:21 on, and often very technical, and that is where people turn off and
02:24 switch off, because it actually gets into the financial mechanisms and
02:29 the technical detail. I think there are things going on, and a lot of
02:33 people would argue it is too late, and it hasn't been fast enough, but I
02:36 don't think we can say that nothing is being done at summits like this.