By Siegfried Mortkowitz/Paris

Listening to him in the run-up to this week’s UN climate conference in Copenhagen, French President Nicolas Sarkozy seems to be more in his element than the average world leader at such international conferences on global threats.

In November, he stood on the steps of the Elysee Palace with Brazilian President Luiz Inacia Lula da Silva and proclaimed that the two of them had agreed on a plan to save the world from global warming. Then, trailing press releases like confetti, he travelled to Brazil and the Commonwealth summit in Trinidad and Tobago to trumpet the proposal.

But this was just typically Sarkozian.

As head of the European Union during the economic crisis, he convoked numerous summits. Before every G8 or G20 summit on the crisis, he loudly proclaimed his intention to save the world from bad capitalism and threatened to walk out of the meeting if it did not come up with concrete solutions.

Sarkozy never walked out, and capitalism remains pretty much what it was before the crisis. Now, that same table-thumping advocacy and media awareness has accompanied Sarkozy’s approach to Copenhagen.

Part of that approach involves the presentation of his plan to save the world climate.

Titled, with a typical sense of drama, Copenhagen: A Project for the World, it declares that “action is urgent and unavoidable, and the time has come for truth, justice and leadership”.

The 15-page document calls for “a commitment by industrialised countries to an 80% reduction (relative to) 1990 in overall GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions by 2050, with individual and collective reductions in the range of 25 to 40% vs 1990 by 2020.”

Sarkozy’s “project” - which was actually drawn up by his Environment Minister, Jean-Louis Borloo - also contains a “climate justice plan designed specifically” for poor countries, which would benefit from financial support from the international community through a tax on financial transactions.

Sarkozy’s plan has already received support from the Brazilian president and former UN secretary general Kofi Annan, but Brussels and France’s European partners have been strangely silent on it.

But environmental groups have been outspoken in their scepticism of Sarkozy’s real commitment to the proposal and the fight against global warming.

In a recent ranking of world leaders on their environmental policies, Greenpeace gave the French president a dismal 3.7 out of a possible 10, one of the worst marks in Europe, well behind German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and only slightly ahead of Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk.

The group described Sarkozy as using “beautiful words” that lacked concrete details and almost never matched his actions. — DPA