The main issue at Paris was climate mitigation-reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases. The willingness of emerging market countries like China and India to enter into carbon reduction talks made it all the more important for the rich countries to offer offsets in the form of funding. The basic shift agreed to in Paris was the abandonment of the firewall that limited demands for emissions reductions to industrialized countries, listed in Annex I of the UN Treaty signed at Rio in 1992. Distributional issues were front and center. At the time, Macron was serving as economic minister in the Socialist cabinet. The Paris climate conference of 2015, remembered fondly in the United States as the high point for Obama-era climate action, was also the signal diplomatic achievement of the Hollande presidency. The protests were all the more striking because environmental equity had been a hot topic in France from the moment that carbon taxes were first introduced under former President François Hollande in 2014. If a rapid energy transition is to be possible in affluent but highly unequal democracies, the gilets jaunes protesters served notice that distributional questions could not be ignored. It was an egregious political misstep, which has put the question of “just transition” at the top of the climate agenda. The weeks of demonstrations and clashes with police that began in France in November 2018 were triggered by the announcement of steep increases in gas prices, at a time when President Emmanuel Macron’s government was slashing taxes on wealth. The gilets jaunes protests haunt global climate politics. Unsustainable Inequalities: Social Justice and the Environment Can the link between income and emissions be broken? Adam Tooze ▪ Winter 2021Ī gilet jaune protester in Toulouse (Alain Pitton/NurPhoto via Getty Images) The rise of the global middle class threatens to blow up the environmental envelope.

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