ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how societal and political actors guided by Ego-Ecology support selfish environmental and climate policy at home, but reject or weaken a coherent, ambitious approach in support of Europe’s sustainability transition. The European Commission particularly introduced both energy and environmental policies into the European Union (EU) policy canon and hence built an institutional framework, which reflected EU expertise in these fields and which could respond to the growing environmental conscience of the European people, for which national policy responses were evidently not sufficient. The Gilets Jaunes movement in France is a good example of different factors which open up alternative agendas to the European environmental conscience, which might add up to a political alternative to mainstream politics of which the European environmental conscience has become part. The Gilets Jaunes movement is made up of several different, sometimes confusing, but nevertheless converging political demands.
