Idoes the fight against global warming deserve to despise our individual freedoms? The question arises when one listens to certain remarks recently publicized. While the climate activist Camille Etienne, on the occasion of the publication of his first book (For an ecological uprisingThreshold, 176 pages, 18 euros), castigates the “powerful” who organize our “apathy” in the face of the ecological emergency, and opposes them with a democracy subordinated to the “planetary boundaries” as realities “non-negotiable”the engineer Jean-Marc Jancovici calls for the establishment of a quota system that would only allow the French to make four plane trips during their lifetime.
In both cases, whether it has its roots in anti-capitalist ecological activism or quantified scientific realism, the discourse leads to the same result: closing the door to any debate on the attack on individual freedoms to which these proposals incidentally lead. The facts speak for themselves, they force us not to think otherwise, freedom only existing because it is collective, for one, and the proposed restriction being only “candy crackers”for the other !
This result is regrettable. It deprives the public of an important element in understanding how the fight against global warming can take place in compliance with the rule of law, the only truly non-negotiable “playing field”.
At the heart of this rule of law are precisely our individual freedoms and, among them, the freedom to undertake, the right to property and the freedom to come and go. The basis of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (DDHC) of 1789, these have until now enabled us to live in a developed society from which we still derive many benefits.
Restrictions and mistrust
Certainly, these freedoms can be framed. Because “Freedom consists in being able to do anything that does not harm others” (art. 4, DDHC), the legislator can create rules prejudicial to their exercise, more especially as in the environmental field, in addition to the fact that the constitutional charter of the environment recognizes since 2005 environmental rights and duties, the Constitutional Council makes the protection of the environment an objective with constitutional value justifying, in the name of the general interest, attacks on certain freedoms.
However, these are not without limits: they can only be provided for by the legislator (in the democratic process), and the Constitutional Council ensures their proportionality with regard to the aim pursued. A balance must be found between particular interests and the general interest.
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