Quoi de neuf? | Issue #2
Quoi de neuf for Sunday, December 20th?
Well, let me tell you…
The Week in Review
N.B: While not all of these news are about France, you can read about all of them in French, as the links go to authentic French news sources.
Will renewable energy be the leading source of electricity in 2025?
The flag of Brittany is now flying in Nantes, a symbolic victory for “la culture et la langue bretonne”.
The Santa Claus of one small French town offered his resignation after being harassed and insulted by passersby.
This year’s ten most expensive works of art.
An unknown exo-planet hiding beyond our solar system has betrayed its location with a radio signal.
A highly more transmissible variant of Covid-19 has been identified in England.
How long could you stay immersed in ice? This Frenchman did it for more than 2.5 hours. Now, that’s a cool world record…
Will Brest be the future French capital of culture?
The enduring legacy of Napoleon in Poland. ($$)
Why “le Français” is a racially charged reference in certain neighborhoods. ($$)
Having a tough time? So is the olive harvest in the Peloponnese.
Do we pick our video game avatars… or do they pick us?
How kimchi found itself front and center in a gastronomical war between China and South Korea.
Are the police racist? According to one poll, the answer is “yes” for 47% of young people in France.
Good news! You can soon eat red kiwis, grown in France.
Bad news! You will soon no longer be able to enter the European Union with a sandwich jambon fromage bought in England. (Remember Brexit? Yeah, that’s why.)
The French destiny of Josephine Baker. ($$)
Artificial chicken is on the menu for the first time in Singapore.
Paris is struggling to stem the tide of crack addiction.
Kangaroos can communicate with humans. (But so can apparently any relatively intelligent animal who spends enough time with humans.)
The best nature and science books to gift this Christmas. ($$)
A British island — and its animal population — is being threatened by the world’s largest iceberg.
France will plant 50 million trees in a bid to fight climate change.
The Deep Dive
Is it time to rethink diesel?
While diesel cars are everywhere in France, in North America, they are more the exception. This is due to many reasons, including more stringent emissions rules on this side of the Atlantic. As many Americans may associate diesel with big rigs that chug noisily on the highways and lifted trucks spewing black smoke as well, it’s got a bit of a bad rep.
But is diesel really more polluting? It’s been a subject of back-and-forth discussion and countless studies, but a new French investigation released this week says that when it comes to environmental pollution — health considerations aside — diesel is actually less harmful to the planet, with less CO2 emissions.
L’essence consomme davantage de carburant (+1,5 litre aux 100 kilomètres) que le diesel. « Cela entraîne des émissions de CO2 (dioxyde de carbone) supérieures de 11 % » à celles du diesel, écrivent les chercheurs. L’essence a donc des répercussions plus marquées que le diesel sur le réchauffement climatique. (Ouest France)
So yes, diesel is “cleaner”, but not necessarily for the person breathing in the exhaust fumes. That’s why Paris already banned all diesel vehicles aged 13 years or older last summer, in 2019, as part of a larger fight to reduce pollution (and traffic jams) in the city center, which is notoriously bad. It’s planning to completely phase out diesel vehicles by the time the 2024 Olympics roll around, and France as a whole is set to ban the sale of all vehicles that run on fossil fuels by 2040.
Bref, internal combustion engines are on their way out, leaving diesel to run out the rest of its life rather misunderstood by the general public. (That might be changing — Jeep recently unveiled its newest Wrangler, one that comes with an expensive EcoDiesel engine that boasts impressive efficiency and power, for instance.) And you can partially blame Volkswagen for that.
In 2015, the car manufacturer was forced to recall almost a million vehicles in France alone due to the "dieselgate" affair, where they 'fessed up to cheating emissions tests in the U.S . That brought new attention — and not the kind you want if you're pushing adoption of diesel cars — to emissions rules worldwide, especially in Europe, where standards aren't as strict as, say, California.
This very Thursday, the top court of the European Union confirmed that Volkswagen breached E.U. rules by using "defeat devices" to rig the tests, yet another blow in a lengthy scandal that has cost the automaker over 30 billion euros thus far — and helped make diesel a dirty name for many.