Emmanuel Macron on France 24: How strong is French President international call?

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00:00 Catherine, on the red carpet, close to the red carpet at the summit

00:04 venue. What is also striking about this is Emmanuel Macron in a buoyant

00:10 mood. He was kind of between a rock and a hard place when it came to

00:15 trying to get a sense across that you couldn't just cancel this debt. We

00:19 heard Thomas making the point there. You talked about some of the

00:23 interplay between some of those countries who were shouting for more

00:26 and how strong is that call, despite what Macron is saying, we need to do

00:31 it step by step, are there those saying this just won't be enough? I

00:39 think we lost Catherine for a second. Catherine Norris-Trent, our

00:42 correspondent close to the red carpet. I was just asking you, that was

00:45 Emmanuel Macron's vision, saying how the summit went. Do you think

00:49 there will be those that you have seen at the summit, African leaders,

00:52 saying this still doesn't go anywhere near enough? For sure. I think

00:59 there are going to be people here who want a radical transformation of

01:03 the international monetary financial system. They want a whole scale

01:08 transformation. They won't get that straight away because these things

01:12 take some time. We have heard calls for everything to be overhauled. We

01:17 heard Emmanuel Macron's open remarks yesterday saying that perhaps we

01:25 wouldn't get a full transformation but this was getting the ball rolling.

01:29 I'm sure there are some here who think that hasn't gone far enough. As

01:34 we were saying earlier with the president of Chad, after one of these

01:37 roundtables, picking up the microphone again and calling for the debt to

01:42 be unilaterally cancelled. Emmanuel Macron, you just heard him there in

01:46 that interview saying that is not an option that is on the table at the

01:49 moment. He is saying it is an issue of credibility. If you just cancel

01:53 debt, no-one will ever loan to you again. For sure there will be people

01:57 who are saying this is not going far enough and some saying it is not

02:01 going fast enough. Others are saying we are making progress, we are

02:05 holding these talks, we are getting the political impetus going, we are

02:08 getting things moving and this is how these things work. They do take

02:12 time. There was a perhaps not so subtle statement from Emmanuel

02:16 Macron and Catherine about the UK, saying that some European countries

02:20 are even still opening coal mines. Absolutely. The neighbour. That

02:29 raised a lot of eyebrows in the UK as well, didn't it? While you have

02:34 disagreements here at this summit, of course we have disagreements

02:38 between Western nations on the way forward there. I remember going back

02:43 to the Trump years in the US. He was all talking about getting coal going

02:47 again and getting the coal mining regions of the US going. There are

02:53 disagreements here, there are inconsistencies between Western

02:57 nations and those are things that Emmanuel Macron does not shy away

03:01 from talking about either. You have described yourself as a centrist in

03:05 the past but your organisation is pretty multi-platform in terms of

03:08 politics. Is there anything from that interview you thought you

03:12 disagreed with from Emmanuel Macron? It is not the right vision.

03:16 There is probably something not disagreeing but missing a bit, which

03:19 has probably not been approached during the interview, so that is why

03:22 it is missing, the role of one specific sector, which is the energy

03:28 sector, and how we can deal in transforming this energy sector as

03:33 fast as we can towards more renewables or decarbonised energy. It has

03:42 been said at different points in the summit that there is an increasingly

03:49 high consensus on the fact, and it is also the international agency

03:54 pushing this, we should stop investing in any new oil and gas project.

04:00 More than that, when we look at financial solutions at hand, there

04:05 is one that has been clearly outlined by the G20 leaders over the

04:09 past years, it is to stop any direct or indirect public subsidy to the

04:15 oil and gas industry. If you look at the figures, the IMF service that

04:20 is this direct and indirect subsidies to the oil and gas industry

04:24 amounts for, look at the figure, $5,400 billion a year. If you look

04:33 at the figures I have said about the SDG stimulus I just mentioned,

04:36 which is about $500 billion a year, you can see the difference. It is

04:40 10 times higher. If you not only private money but also public money

04:45 flow it into the right direction, then you would change the course of

04:48 history. To me, this is probably what has not been highlighted enough

04:53 for this specific industry. You ask whether there is a good headline to

04:56 remember. I do have one in mind that would probably put on the same

05:01 page South leaders and Northern leaders. We have to prevent the wrong

05:07 way risk. Either from the Southern perspective or the Northern

05:11 perspective, at the end of the day, it all comes down to the same road.

05:14 We are in the wrong way. This is about changing the course of history.

05:18 This is another option that was on the table. I do hope, because the

05:22 the Y20 has been calling for that solution for long years, it should be taken into account.

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