SOn the climate change front, there are at least two pieces of good news. First, everyone – or almost – now agrees on the objective: to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. France has even enshrined this horizon in law – as have most of the major carbon-emitting States.
Then, there is now a political consensus on the fact that this transition will require massive investments: getting out of oil, gas and coal means profoundly changing the way we move, feed ourselves, work, live . The President of the Republic summed it up himself during from a video posted on YouTubeat the end of January : “Today, we are not there. And if we don’t change things, we won’t get there. »
This is indeed the heart of the problem: the immensity of the project to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in France is now a consensus, but the implementation remains very insufficient. The High Council for the Climate explained in his last report how France is not on the right trajectory.
In transport, the development of electric vehicles is progressing but remains timid, and investments in rail and public transport are slow. In construction, housing renovation – 19% of our emissions – is not taking off, despite the billions invested and the diversity of systems deployed. In the field of renewable energies, France is the only European country not to have achieved its objectives, it was even fined 500 million euros by the European Commission.
The government seems paralyzed
No serious trajectory concerns the massive transformation of the agricultural sector. In the industry, real efforts are planned, but they have not yet borne fruit. However, the installation, after the presidential election, of a general secretariat for ecological planning, with Elisabeth Borne, in Matignon, made it possible to collect and organize the necessary policies.
Why, despite the fragile political consensus on the climate issue, does achieving the set objectives seem out of reach? The example of the thermal renovation of buildings is one of the most telling: the subject has been on the table for more than ten years. However, the overall renovations, which allow a real improvement in comfort and a reduction in consumption, only concerned 66,000 housing units in 2022, whereas it would have taken ten times more to hope to maintain a realistic trajectory and reach the carbon neutrality.
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