QWhatever its color, the government which will determine and lead the nation’s policy after the legislative elections on June 12 and 19, must be capable of proposing, discussing, then having adopted, by the greatest number of possible citizens, clear choices – because they will be structuring for the decades to come – in terms of ecological transition.
This is first and foremost about the choice of the energy mix. This is perhaps the least delicate of all, insofar as, despite positions that may seem radically opposed among political leaders and among the French population, the reasonable path consists in developing renewable energies on a massive scale, while relying on nuclear power to ensure the transition and continuing to work on possible other solutions.
The choice of the respective places to be given to technological innovations and changes in behavior seems, on the other hand, much more delicate. It is a concrete question of indicating to what extent we are collectively ready to change our lifestyles and to give more space to sobriety. While the latter term is still very little used in French political discourse, its English equivalent (“sufficiency”) is featured prominently in the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It means that we could collectively obtain the same amount of well-being and guarantee all human beings a decent standard of living while reducing our material consumption, and therefore our greenhouse gas emissions, as well as our consumption of energy.
The tensions around this question are major, as evidenced by the indignant reactions of politicians, particularly French, to the famous letter written by the Dutch Labor Party Sicco Mansholt in February 1972, a month before he became a short-lived president of the European Commission (until January 1973). Following his reading of the report of the Club of Rome “Limits to Growth”, published the same year, he argued in favor of a sharp reduction in the production and consumption of material goods, organized thanks to a planning capable of to provide everyone with a basic minimum. Twenty years later, in 1992, President George HW Bush declared “The American standard of living is non-negotiable”. Today, the refusal of a large number of political leaders to promote sobriety continues to be rooted in the idea that it would be draconian and punitive.
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