A Green Marshall Plan

Nicolas Hulot is the green face of France. During 2007's presidential campaign, the popular adventure-TV-star-turned-environmental-activist issued his "Ecological Pact," a list of environmental demands that drew more than 700,000 signatures online. He convinced every major candidate to sign on before he would desist from running for office himself. As such, he was a driving force behind France's epic Grenelle environmental roundtable last year, bringing together thousands of experts and yielding a law that makes their recommendations a reality. Hulot sat down with NEWSWEEK's Tracy McNicoll in Boulogne, east of Paris. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: Has the green revolution arrived in France?
NICOLAS HULOT: Not yet. It has started. We've gone from recognition to action. [But] the food, energy, financial and ecological crises show there's a crisis of the system. I'm not yet convinced that France—any more than other countries—has understood that it's the system we have to question. In France, we'll go in the right direction in one area, but then encourage other policies that amplify the problem.

Like what?
The recent Economic Modernization Law will multiply box stores, which oblige people to do big return trips and themselves have long supply-circuits. And when the price of oil rose, the first thought was to subsidize it —exactly what we shouldn't be doing anymore.

Do falling oil prices worry you?
Yes. The only virtue of the oil crisis was the clear signal to learn to be less dependent on oil. Now, because prices vary, people behave accordingly, reducing usage only when oil is expensive. That impedes long-term investment and creativity. We need a carbon tax that would rise constantly, above the cost of living. That way everyone knows oil won't drop and there is a predictable, rational rise.

But in a recession, people think about their immediate economic troubles. How do you convince them these things are worthwhile?
It's complicated. We have to say with one voice—west, east, north, and south—that the climate crisis will spare no one. We have no choice but to change our development model. Not for our grandchildren, for our children.

We're in an economic model, at least in Europe, where most of our taxes are placed on work. But it isn't work we want to regulate. We have to liberate work, since the scourge here is unemployment. It's our environmental impact and energy usage that must be regulated. So we must transfer taxation on work to environmental and energy taxation. That's fiscal-pressure neutral, but you're creating a new economy.

So we can't rely on the market to regulate this?
No. It's not a question of dogma. It's a question of physical reality: we're drawing from resources with finite stocks. You don't need a Nobel in economics to understand that when you're drawing from a finite stock, you need regulation between what it can give you and what you can ask from it. Today, we've just shifted from the illusion of abundance to the reality of rarity.