How to achieve the greenhouse gas reduction targets that we have set, and at what price, while promoting carbon-free reindustrialization in France and Europe. This is the equation on which the government is currently working.
The executive will present its roadmap, its climate strategy, next Wednesday, July 5. In the meantime, several authorities spoke out this week, in turn, saying that the account was not there.
This was the case of the High Council for the Climate, as well, and it was less expected, of the Academy of Technologies, a public establishment made up of more than 300 experts, including researchers, including four Nobel Prize winners. Chaired by the former boss of Airbus Denis Ranque, this academy is formal: we cannot bet everything on innovation and technology to achieve carbon neutrality. This is the subject of a notice published this week.
Let’s take an example: the mobility sector, a sector in which C02 emissions are not falling, and in particular because people are moving more and more. Admittedly, innovations have allowed planes to consume ever less kerosene, but traffic has almost returned to its pre-Covid level.
With regard to cars, the European Union has certainly planned to ban the sale of new thermal vehicles in 2035, but it would take two to three times as many nuclear power stations as today to meet the demand for electricity, up to 50 plants, likes to repeat Barbara Dalibard, spokesperson for the Academy and president of the supervisory board of Michelin.
The alternative is sobriety according to the Academy of Technologies
It will go a third of the way, according to these experts. A sobriety accompanied by incentives, both individual and collective. With this appeal to the public authorities: we must have a real strategy based on massive investment in public transport, in infrastructure, developing a network of cycle paths, to promote soft mobility.
The Academy advocates fair sobriety even if it refuses to take part in the debate on taxation. The government has planned to tax air tickets more, to finance rail, and to extend the tax on the heaviest vehicles.