In France, you became popular for sharing information about climate change and energy—what we now might call an influencer. How and when did you take on this role?
By mere chance, basically. I was trained as an engineer. We were focused on telecommunications and IT, and that’s what I’d been doing for, let’s say 10-15 years, between the mid-80s and the late 90s. In the late ‘90s, I became very interested in the topic of climate change. I had no training in environmental sciences whatsoever. I had a background in physics and chemistry, but I didn’t learn anything about climate change during my studies.
But I was curious, I was an independent consultant, so it was easier for me to allocate my time. I decided to devote my time to studying climate change. I spent half my time sending questions to scientists.
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Eventually I was asked to give lectures and speak at conferences, which I began to do. And the best way to understand something is to give a course on it. So that’s what I did.
Each time I had a question during a conference to which I didn’t have the answer, I thought, ‘Ah, I should take a look at that.’