“Let’s avoid symbolic, attention-grabbing responses, whose actual carbon impact is insignificant or very low,” Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux, president of France’s most powerful business lobby, Le Mouvement des Entreprises de France (MEDEF), warned on August 30. “You all know what I’m alluding to.”

Roux de Bézieux was referring to one of the salutary scandals that has managed to pierce the French news cycle of late: private jets. Amid a record-setting summer heat wave — which, coming on the heels of a protracted drought, has left large parts of the country exposed to violent forest fires — social media users took to publicizing the flight itineraries of corporate executives.

One was France’s wealthiest individual, Bernard Arnault, who on May 25 took a ten-minute flight to London from one of his properties west of the British capital. Added together, the eighteen flights taken that month by Arnault, who is owner of the LVMH luxury goods conglomerate, emitted an estimated 176 tons of carbon dioxide. Vincent Bolloré, who in recent years has moved to consolidate a far-right pole in French media, took his Falcon 7X jet on a three-flight circuit on July 17, departing from Toulon to Paris at 4 PM before taking an early evening jaunt to Naples and returning to Paris that same night. Marianne estimates that the day’s trip released fourteen tons of carbon dioxide — more than the 11.5 tons resulting from the average French person’s annual consumption.