Roissy Airport (France) (AFP)

Members of Greenpeace partially repainted an Air France plane parked at Paris-Charles-de-Gaulle airport in Roissy on Friday, accusing the government of "greenwashing" on environmental issues around air traffic, noted the AFP.

Nine NGO activists, dressed in yellow or white, climbed the fence of the airport tarmac around 9 a.m. and were deployed around an Air France Boeing 777 plane, parked on the ground and without passengers in edge.

Using a roller mounted on a huge pole, they repainted part of the device green for ten minutes, AFP noted.

By this action, they intended to illustrate the "greenwashing" - "écoblanchiment" in French - or the fallacious use, according to them, of arguments relating to good ecological practices.

Standing on a wing, several activists deployed placards which read: "Is there a pilot to save the climate?"

or "the solution: fewer planes".

The air transport gendarmerie quickly intervened to question the activists.

Some, perched on the roof or the wing, refused to go down.

"We are here today to denounce the + greenwashing + of the government on the issues of regulation and reduction of air traffic and the lack of ambition of the climate and resilience bill" which is "an empty shell", declared to AFP Sarah Fayolle, transport campaigner at Greenpeace France.

"The government is promoting the green plane as the miracle solution to make the sector compatible with the climate crisis," she added.

The climate bill, which incorporates certain proposals from the Citizen's Climate Convention, will be debated in the Assembly at the end of March and in a special committee from Monday.

In a statement, Greenpeace asked the deputies to go further, so as not to "continue as before, without calling into question a development model based on unlimited traffic growth and unsustainable for the climate".

The NGO also asks that the State support the retraining of employees in the sector.

Hit hard by the effects of the health crisis due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the aviation sector has seen its traffic collapse, leading in its wake to an unprecedented social crisis.

At Charles-de-Gaulle airport, this threat weighs on some 90,000 direct jobs at the leading European airport.

A new inter-union mobilization is scheduled for March 18.

© 2021 AFP