Nersac (France) (AFP)

Emmanuel Macron praised the role that industry can play in the fight against global warming by launching on Thursday in Charente the construction of a European sector of electric batteries.

"Like you, I am extremely concerned about the consequences of climate change," said the head of state, speaking to 200 employees of the Saft factory, a subsidiary of Total, specializing in the production of batteries.

"But I am not one of the catastrophists" for whom "we must destroy jobs, we must decide to make decreases to meet this challenge," he said. "We will respond to it, as humanity has always done, by innovation and the reorganization of know-how," he added, pleading to "reconcile industry and ecology".

Before his speech, Emmanuel Macron visited, with the Minister of Economy Bruno Le Maire and the CEO of Total Patrick Pouyanné, the Saft battery factory in Nersac, near Angoulême, which is to be expanded with a pilot line production of batteries for electric vehicles.

This line, intended for initial industrialization tests, will begin production from mid-2021, and will reduce the workforce at the Nersac plant from 90 currently to around 200 at term. A second stage involves the production of large-scale batteries in Douvrin (Pas-de-Calais) and then in Kaiserslautern (Germany) with nearly 2,000 jobs at each of the two sites towards the end of the decade.

"We are going very, very fast," said Patrick Pouyanné, emphasizing the "bets" to be noted, in particular that of responding quickly to industrial demand and "producing batteries for a million vehicles".

For Emmanuel Macron, this is an issue of "European sovereignty" because car manufacturers must no longer depend, for electric batteries, on Asian, Chinese or Korean producers, who can "raise prices as they wish, which that they started to do. "

As he did last week while visiting a pharmaceutical factory in Dunkirk (North), he once again defended the merits of his fiscal and social "reforms". "I want to be criticized but without these tax reforms, there is no investment," he said, citing in particular the partial abolition of the ISF. "It is not a coincidence" if unemployment falls and industrial employment "restarts for the first time in 12 years", he insisted.

Emmanuel Macron is then expected in Angoulême for the opening of the 47th comic book festival, which runs until February 2.

200 people were gathered at the end of the morning in front of the station to protest against the pension reform at the call of unions, including the CGT.

© 2020 AFP