Every Saturday we decipher climate issues with François Gemenne, professor at HEC, president of the Scientific Council of the Foundation for Nature and Man and member of the IPCC. Saturday November 4: the perfect solution against climate change.
While solutions to climate change exist, some voices still find fault with them in the name of ethics. François Gemenne explains to us precisely the differences between these ethics.
franceinfo: This week, François, you tell us that the perfect solution does not exist!
François Gemenne: Let’s say that I am quite amazed at our propensity to criticize the progress we are making. It’s as if no solution can find favor. Wind turbines spoil landscapes, solar panels use rare earths, electric cars have batteries made from critical metals, meat alternatives look too much like meat and not enough like lentils, etc. etc. Honestly, I’m a little tired of these constant criticisms against anything that even remotely resembles a solution.
Yet there is truth in these criticisms, when we see, for example, how are critical metals and rare earths extracted?
Obviously, there are plenty of things to improve. But we also have to see where we are starting from, the progress made, and above all we have to look at the point of comparison. Despite their flaws, an electric car is infinitely preferable to a thermal car, and a wind farm infinitely preferable to a coal-fired power plant. The problem is that we’re looking for a perfect solution, and that perfect solution, well, it doesn’t exist. Whenever we want to produce energy, whenever we want to transport people, there is always an environmental footprint. The challenge is to reduce it as much as possible. If we try so hard to find a perfect solution, we condemn ourselves to doing nothing at all.
Can we really count on technology to solve the problem?
Here we arrive at the heart of the debate: sometimes we no longer even discuss the faults of this or that technology, but of technology itself, between those who rely on technological progress and those who see it as a pretext to avoid question the organization of the economy and our consumption logic. The problem is that we still tend to pit the two against each other, in a debate that is becoming more and more polarized. While we will need both, we no longer have the luxury of choice! We will need technology and political and social changes. Let’s stop thinking that one necessarily excludes the other! For cars, for example, we will need to review our relationship with the individual car, but also to drive less polluting cars.
Why is the debate so polarized?
There is an opposition between an ethic of responsibility and an ethic of conviction. The ethic of responsibility will lead us to support any solution that allows us to get closer to the goal, that is to say, to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. The ethics of conviction, on the other hand, will have a precise vision of the ideal to be achieved, and will reject any solution that does not correspond to this ideal, even if it sometimes means being inflexible. In aviation, for example, the ethics of responsibility will work to optimize the trajectories of planes, to seek alternative fuels, etc. The ethics of conviction will often militate against these solutions, arguing that the objective is to reduce the number of flights, not to reduce emissions from existing flights.
Can the two approaches be defended?
In principle, yes. Both are obviously respectable. But I see two problems with the ethics of conviction, in the case of climate change. The first problem is obviously time: if we reject all solutions in the hope of reaching an ideal solution, we often risk waiting a long time. And the impacts of climate change are already there, there is a real urgency to act and deploy all the solutions that exist, as quickly as possible. Because this purism already has consequences: today, there are many companies that already practice green hushingFor example.
What is the green hushing ?
It is the opposite of green washing. THE green washing consists of exaggerating one’s commitment to ecology, in the hope of hiding unsavory practices. THE green hushing consists precisely of not communicating about one’s commitments or the solutions that one deploys, for fear of being accused of not doing enough, or of not being perfect enough. However, these solutions need to be known, so that they can spread!
What’s the other problem with the ethics of conviction? You said there were two problems: time and ?
It is the fact that the ideal, sometimes, goes beyond the fight against climate change: the end of capitalism, or the class struggle, for example. This sometimes leads the proponents of the ethics of conviction, who aim for a future ideal, to despise all initiatives which aim to improve things today. You will surely have already heard this somewhat contemptuous and simplistic little phrase from the mouths of several political leaders, for example: “ecology without class struggle is gardening”.
This leitmotif comes back especially in the mouths of those who are happy to wait for the big night without getting their hands too dirty. The problem with this ideological vision of the fight against climate change, I believe, is that it necessarily leads a part of the population to turn away from the fight against climate change: by nature, the ideology seeks to triumphing one worldview over another. And for the climate, we are going to need everyone.