The Financial Times reports environmentalists and other politicos are up in arms over French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s desire to appoint geochemist Claude Allegre—a denier of man-made climate change who called Al Gore’s Nobel Prize a “political gimmick”—to France’s new “super-ministry” of industry and innovation:
Mr Sarkozy wants to bring Mr Allègre, 72, a freethinking, former socialist education minister, into the government in a reshuffle after next month’s European parliamentary elections. The president appears to reckon that appointing someone from outside his own centre-right party will help to counter perceptions that he is a polarising, sectarian leader who decides everything himself. Several portfolios are already held by figures from the left and centre.
Alain Juppé, the former centre-right prime minister, said the appointment would send a “terribly bad signal” ahead of international negotiations to secure a successor to the Kyoto treaty on cuts to carbon emissions.
Emphasis mine. I can understand Sarkozy wanting to look like he doesn’t eschew a range of viewpoints, but this is a bit like appointing Richard Dawkins to an office of faith-based initiatives. It also doesn’t help that Juppé, a member of Sarkozy’s own party, thinks it’s a stupid way to present yourself as an open-minded leader.
