NOThere we are. In this summer of 2022, France, like Australia or the United States before it, understood that all its wealth would not protect it from the ecological crisis while its dependence on fossil fuels is becoming an unbearable social vulnerability. It is time to return to the fundamentals of economic reasoning. Very far from the mad mismanagement of growth, economic analysis was conceived by Aristotle two and a half millennia ago as a discipline of sobriety, seeking to satisfy essential human needs in a constrained environment by ensuring the correspondence between reasoned and limited resources. But this first sobriety, “sobriety-frugality”, unfolds in the space of the home which is by nature unequal: the members of the family are placed in a hierarchical relationship and must not become equals. There is therefore no reason for the satisfaction of basic needs, which proceeds from a principle of necessity, to result in a just situation. It is in the space of the city that the necessary may or may not be judged as sufficient.
The second age of sobriety, taking note of the dazzling acceleration of economic development after the Second World War, intended to slow down the overconsumption of the natural resources it engendered, starting with the supply of energy. It is up to the négaWatt association to have introduced this concept of “sobriety-moderation” in the early 2000s to distinguish it from the logic of energy efficiency. As much as energy efficiency aims to reduce the quantity of energy (and/or carbon) per unit of production, energy sobriety aims to reduce the volume of energy consumed and therefore to guarantee that the policies implemented are reflected effectively through energy savings by avoiding a “rebound effect” in consumption.
In this regard, article 2 of the law on energy transition voted in 2015 in France maintains a fatal misinterpretation by claiming to support “green growth through the development and deployment of lean processes”. The visionary work of négaWatt has made it possible in particular to distinguish between different sobriety policies: structural (bringing places of work and residence closer together), dimensional (reducing the size of cars), usage (taking public transport) and collaborative (promoting car sharing).
A third period began a few years ago, when scientific articles from the trend of degrowth and published in influential journals undertook to revisit work dating from the early 1990s on basic human needs developed in particular by the British researcher Ian Gough. A dialectic of degrowth then appeared: just as it seems impossible to decouple economic growth from the environmental damage it causes, just as much it seems possible to satisfy decent universal living standards while reducing global energy consumption (which has since doubled). forty years), on the condition of a gigantic redistribution of resources between and within countries. Justice is indeed the key notion of this third age of sobriety, “sobriety-sharing”.
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