I write this article on Day 4 of the Aude Fire in Southern France, close to where I have a house. At the moment, 17,000 hectares of land in the Aude Department have been burnt, many villages completely gutted, transport and electricity cut over a vast area, and a flame front that yesterday took up a length of 80km. Deployed against this fire are 2,500 firefighters, 2,000 of whom have been fighting the fires for 3 days now without rest, backed up by 9 Canadair airplanes, which can scoop up 6,000 litres of water at a go from bodies of water, as well as numerous firefighting helicopters and over 600 fire engines. Despite all this firefighting capacity, the fire was only brought under control by the end of the third day.
The French department of Aude occupies roughly 6,000 km² in the South of France, with its eastern edge stretching from north of Narbonne down to slightly north of Perpignan on the Mediterranean coast, it stretches Wast over a rocky, dry, and hilly area known as the Corbieres to the world-famous medieval city of Carcassonne. The department is also known for its spectacular Cathar Castles perched on top of dry, rocky mountains, and also for its excellent, rich red wines, which will form a crucial part of this ‘fire and profit’ story.
It is believed that the current fire started by the side of the road, close to the little village of Ribaute on the evening of Tuesday, 5 August 2025. The flames fanned by a strong Tramontana wind (funnelled between the Pyrenees and the Massif Central) gusting at 70km/hr, rapidly covered a large area of 1,000 hectares, progressing at 6km/hr in a southeasterly direction. Ribaute lies about 45km from the large town of Narbonne, which in turn lies about 10km from the sea. Over that first night, the fire had raged out of control, and now covered 5,000 hectares, with 1,500 firefighters having been deployed. The first death was recorded of a lady who reputedly refused to leave her home, where she was later found incinerated. By Day 2, the fire had completely interrupted the national traffic grid. The main autoroute down to Spain, the A9, was cut at Beziers, roughly 80km to the north of Narbonne, and also on the South side of the fire at Perpignan heading northwards. This autoroute is one of France’s and Europe’s busiest, carrying traffic from France and North and Central Europe to Spain and back, especially busy during the summer holiday season. I had cycled over it two days before the fire and looked out over six lanes of static traffic in both directions.
In wide swathes of the South of France, where the fire risk is considered very high, the countryside, including country lanes, are currently closed off in an attempt to reduce the risk of further fires, for which there are no longer any spare firefighting resources available. On Day 2, we were confined indoors on the advice of the authorities. As soon as we emerged onto the balcony, our eyes and throats were stung by the acrid fumes. Buildings 100 meters away appeared hazy. On the night of Day 1, half the evening sky was jet black, and the other half was midnight blue. By Day 2, the smoke cloud could be seen not just from Spain, but from Majorca, 460km away, as well as easily visible from the International Space Station.
Accounts are beginning to emerge of individual heroism; for example, a solitary firefighter with a homeowner defending a house entirely surrounded by flames. The firefighter allegedly told the homeowner, “We are now totally alone here. This may be futile, and we may be dead in a few minutes. Meanwhile, we must soak the walls of the house as best we can”. They both survived to tell their tale of bravery and the sacrifices that firefighters are sometimes willing to make to save lives and property. At least a dozen firefighters were badly injured combatting the fires.
Is this just one of those large-scale natural disasters which occupy the news and the public’s attention span for a day or two, or is there more to it? I was expecting the blame game to start on Day 2, but it erupted seriously on Day 3. The French Prime Minister appeared close to the scene and made a statement to the press that this fire was a result of climate change. Obviously. Immediately, more cogent counter-narratives began to emerge.
One local interviewed said: “All of our children here in the Aude are taught that the best way of controlling fires in the Aude, is our vineyards, they are natural fire brakes”. Vineyards are watered; the vines are covered in green, wet leaves; weeds and dry grasses are cut. But, unfortunately, it has been government and EU policy to rip up the vineyards and return the land to the wild. What grows instead is known as ‘garrigue’. This is a combination of dry, drought-resistant shrubs, dry grasses, and eventually Mediterranean Pines and Cork Oaks, both of which are drought resistant, (i.e., dry), and combust easily. This garrigue is what mainly has been burning in the Aude. Aude historically has been one of France’s main wine production areas, where over 60% of the surface was given over to vineyards.
The French Government has recently adopted a policy of ripping up vineyards thanks to a budget of €120 million. They offer a one-off payment to any vineyard willing to permanently rip up its vines of €4,000/hectare. This programme equates to the destruction of 30,000 hectares of vines, which is the target for 2024-2025. Aude, one of the most intensive and productive wine producing areas in France, which in 1978 had around 20% of its land area taken up by vineyards, has already lost nearly half of its wine producing capacity. The area originally devoted to wine production in the Aude was 119,000 hectares, now it is down to just 67,000 hectares. The reason given by the French Government is this will help stabilise the global climate, by reducing carbon emissions and to reduce competition in the European wine making market.
The programme is known as the ‘Arrachage Ukraine’ policy in France, named because it is financed by European funds intended to support vineyards affected by the consequences of the Ukraine war. For years, the Aude winemakers have been warning of the risks of ripping up the vineyards, saying, “There’ll be a giant fire because of this policy”. Philippe Monziols said, “For months we’ve been warning the Prefecture of the risks of a major fire … It’s because of that that the fires are blazing so much … One day, the fires will blaze all the way to the sea”, he added presciently. He also said, “For years, the European Union has been destroying our vineyards; it’s accelerating. Ukraine has given an additional pretext”.
The ripping up (or grubbing up as the politicians prefer to say) of vineyards has been going on since the late 1980s, when over 320,000 hectares, mainly in Italy and the South of France, have been destroyed with the land left to grow wild. Furthermore, since 2023, France has implemented an additional scheme to rip up a further 9,500 hectares mainly in the Languedoc (Aude) and Bordeaux with the intention of ‘encouraging diversification’.
In addition to all that, the European Commission’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has a rural development fund (Pillar II) intended to enhance environmental sustainability, funded by the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD), which also aims at ripping up vineyards. The EAFRD is the main agricultural development fund under CAP. Its policy goals are specifically aligned with the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). France has its own CAP-France strategic partnership, aimed at realising EAFRD goals, possessing an eye-watering budget of €11 billion, spread over a period from 2023-2027. An important part of CAP-France’s work is by funding projects that promote sustainability, climate action, biodiversity, and inclusive rural economies.
Locals are well aware from childhood that vineyards are the primary protection against wildfires: “As a kid in the Aude, one learns that the vine is the simplest, most precious, most obvious of firebreaks”.
The scientific justification for destroying vineyards to satisfy Agenda 2030 requirements is based on:
- Soil degradation (loss of organic matter, erosion)
- Low carbon sequestration compared to natural vegetation or agroforestry
As the Aude has been producing high quality wines since the Greeks first settled the coast in 600 BC and subsequently during the Roman conquest of the area, making for a 2,600-year-old tradition of producing high-quality wines which continues to this day, it’s difficult to argue that the soil is becoming poorer. Quite the contrary; such a long-lasting, quality wine production points to incontestable sustainability.
The justification for ripping up vines in some vague attempt to grow garrigue in its place, which is likely to burn every few years, causing massive release of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide into the atmosphere is even more fanciful. Most estimates consider that the carbon release into the atmosphere from Mediterranean vegetation fires at around 0.5 tonnes of carbon/hectare, making the carbon emission of this fire around 8,000 tonnes of carbon. That figure is growing as the fire continues to blaze.
What’s more, the carbon capture (sequestration) of vines compared to garrigue is greater. Yes, vines capture more carbon than the replacement scrubland once the vines are destroyed. The difference is about 0.5 tonnes/hectare of CO₂ in favour of vines.
We demonstrated in an earlier article just how unscientific some of the prominent scientific claims made to justify a combat against climate change are. Here would seem to be an equally egregious example of pseudo-science used to impose unwanted change on populations by certain elites.
But who really stands to gain?
Agricultural land sold for an average of €6,400/hectare in Aude last year. In 2024, 26,950 new housing units were constructed in Aude. The region has the largest land consumption rate for building purposes of all of France, with these 26,950 new units taking up just over 1,000 hectares in 2024 alone. The average sale price of constructible land in Aude is €1.7 million/hectare. Thus, the ripped up vineyards, for which the owner is compensated merely €4,000/hectare, when bought by a developer with authorisation to build, increase in value by over 265 times on average. Put another way, if an investor buys one hectare of ripped up vines in Aude for €6,400, he would expect to sell it to a developer for a profit of €1.69 million. For the 1,000 hectares transformed annually in the Aude, this amounts to €1 billion.
Discovering who the institutional investors are who are buying up this vineyard land to transform into building plots is not easy to come by in France, as the authorities are somewhat secretive on the identities of large land acquisitions, even if the sales themselves are recorded in the Demande de Valeurs Foncieres (DVF) database.
But it’s not only land speculators and building promoters who stand to gain massively by coercing vineyards to cease their activities. In 2020 a construction permit was requested by Hexagone Energie for a vast solar energy installation in the heart of the Aude, at Fontjonceuse, and close to the centre of Aude’s fires. The initial plan is to install 62 hectares of solar panels (an area of roughly 1km x 600m). It takes some imagining to picture such a vast swathe of solar panels in an exceptionally beautiful landscape. But Fontjonceuse is only the pilot project; the total projects for solar arrays in the area are nearly 10 times larger, reaching a staggering 500 hectares (a vast area of roughly 5km x 1km).
A public inquest was initiated in 2021 for the initial 62 hectares of solar panels. Local opposition was immense and became well-organised with time. One example, Volvestre Survolte, has organised public protests against this massive imposition of solar panels, the last one being on 24 May 2025. They said, “The Government is imposing by ideology alone and not through rational justification the massive installation of wind turbines and solar arrays”. The overwhelming view of the locals was to oppose the project, which would permanently disfigure the beautiful landscape. Whereas the state, intent on its major ‘Energy Transition’ policy aligned with the SDGs and Agenda 2030, supports the transition from traditional ways of life to so-called carbon-neutral energy production. The public consultation document used to present the issue to the public, opens the debate with a heavy dose of SDG propaganda:
To reconcile the fight against climate change in order to obtain a carbon neutral lifestyle, controlling energy prices, and energy security, this project demonstrates the concrete action that the Government is taking to ensure that carbon is taken out of energy production which will remain competitive and sovereign. On the national level climate change has already impacted the ways of life of the French people.
And so it goes on in the same vein for pages containing the same loaded information. If there are any doubts on the validity of the science regarding Agenda 2030, please refer to my most recent UK Column article.
Fontjoncouse, where the first of these massive solar arrays is to be erected, is located a mere 10km to the southeast of where this fire started at Ribaute. The habitual Tramontana wind blowing from the northwest at 70km/hr put Fontjoncouse immediately in the predictable line of the fire and, not surprisingly, the village and the surroundings were gutted. A famous restaurant chef from the village, Gilles Goujoun, reported that his “home and restaurant were saved but everything around was total desolation”.
Could the fire have been started deliberately by interests aligned with the implantation of the vast solar panel arrays or large building plots? Events like the fire at Hawaii and others would suggest that this is not an impossibility. Indeed, France has a long tradition of setting fire to land and buildings for purposes such as collecting insurance, etcetera.
Hexagone Energie, which is the front company for creating these vast solar arrays in Aude, belongs to the French subsidiary of Deloitte. Deloitte officially aligned its global strategy with Agenda 2030 and the SDGs in the Deloitte Global Impact Report. As part of this strategy, it advises governments on “carbon-neutral pathways, SDG aligned investment strategies and transition strategy”. Specifically, it gives this strategy advice to the French Government here, as well as in private consultations.
Once again following an all too-familiar trend, we see global companies such as Deloitte (with its annual revenue of $65 billion) pushing governments to activate climate change-based policies, and at the same time creating companies that directly profit from these policies. Climate change is all about big business and huge profits for these global companies.
As an interesting postscript to this article, while researching it, I started to receive unsolicited internet advertising, encouraging me to sell my farmland and install solar panels on it. This publicity originated from a company called Digital Sun ENR, a start-up from 2022, which, according to its website, has many hundreds of agricultural solar arrays around France.