LIs the consumption of worldly goods a necessity, a pleasure or a vice? And when do we switch from one to the other? This question, which runs through history, is coming back into fashion with the ecological emergency. Our way of life is not compatible with our future on this planet. To meet this challenge, two camps clash, that of adaptation and that of rupture. In the first camp, there are enthusiasts convinced by the climate emergency.
Often entrepreneurs, they believe in the plasticity of capitalism and in its innovative capacity. Successful boss, Guillaume Poitrinal is of this caliber. He left the real estate development giant Unibail in 2013 to create his own wooden building construction company. And has just released a book that sums up his thinking well: To end the apocalypse. An ecology of action (Stock, 280 pages 19.50 euros). For him, it is necessary “subjugate capitalism to ecology. Just as we were able to enslave it in the past to democracy, individual freedoms or social justice”.
According to him, like for most entrepreneurs engaged in this fight, the most famous of which is Bill Gates, technology can fight global warming, provided that we invest immediately in the right solutions and that the State supports the transition to more expensive solutions: electric cars, hydrogen, carbon capture, recycling, smart cities… Such a massive transformation of the economy needs more money, therefore more growth, and will give rise to a wave of transformations which, in turn, will take the economy to new heights.
Sobriety is not a choice
The camp opposite, represented in France by the environmentalist movement and well beyond, believes on the contrary that it would be to put fuel in the locomotive so that it rushes faster into the wall. It is our society that must be changed, and first of all our behaviors, which lead to waste. The climate affair is only one more illustration of the wrong road on which we are engaged. We have to review everything, our relationship to time, to work, to property, to others.
A spiritual revolution that the great degrowth theorist Serge Latouche describes as “new art of living”. Failing to resolve this resurgence of the millennial debate between being and having, we can allow ourselves a more pragmatic form of synthesis. The energy transition will be expensive: 4% of France’s annual gross domestic product (GDP), says economist Patrick Artus, more than 100 billion euros per year.
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