“Vote for me! Vote for less!” While France must drastically reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to curb global warming, it is difficult to imagine candidates for the presidential election putting forward a speech of sobriety. Enough to ? Let’s start with a definition, borrowed from Ademe: according to the agency, sobriety describes “a search for moderation in the production and consumption of goods and services requiring energy or material resources”. For Yves Marignac, spokesperson for the Négawatt association, this means promoting a way of life “compatible, when generalized, with planetary boundaries.” And this while ensuring “decent living conditions for all”sums up the spokesperson for the association which, since 2001, has been working on energy transition scenarios.
In rich countries like ours, it means saying goodbye to a number “expensive, even harmful services: excessive use of the plane, traveling alone in an SUV in town, etc. So many things that we know are neither generalizable nor essential”, continues the specialist. But if “sobriety is increasingly recognized by experts as an essential lever of action for sustainability, it remains negatively connoted in the political debate”.
Why, when the person who wins the ballot in May will have the responsibility of putting France on the pace towards carbon neutrality, is it so difficult to approach this frugal track?
In fact, few politicians are enthusiastic about what appears to many to be a discourse of restrictions. Historically, this notion of frugality nevertheless accompanies the emergence of political ecology, with the candidacy of René Dumont, in 1974. “At the time, it was not a central axis of his political proposal, but we find the idea of a need for general moderation and a critique of productivism”, explains political scientist Bruno Villalba, professor at AgroParisTech where he directs the Master’s degree in Transition Governance, Ecology and Society. Not far from fifty years later, the ecological crisis has not really brought this argument up to date, he notes.
Even though the necessary introduction of sobriety policies is included in the National Low Carbon Strategy – the roadmap for the fight against global warming, revised in 2018 – this concept is only brought into the debate on the margins. left of the political spectrum. It appears, by small touches, in the program of certain major candidates for the presidential election, as with the ecologist Yannick Jadot or the candidate of La France insoumise, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, notes the political scientist.
“As environmental issues have been perceived as important problems by the French, ecology has been taken over and carried by more traditional political actors who have discarded this dimension of sobriety from political ecology”explains Simon Persico, political scientist, teacher at Sciences-Po Grenoble and specialist in parties and environmental policies. “It is not at all recovered by the executive and even less by the right, which defends the productivist paradigm consisting in saying that we must find economic growth, assimilated to the extension of production and consumption.he continues. And this even if this discourse goes against credible scenarios of ecological transitions.
The concepts of green growth or even sustainable development have thus emerged to reconcile ecology and market logic, marginalizing the idea that public policies could encourage citizens to consume not only better, but less.
Promising that the Growth Plan would be “a green planthe Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire, also promised in the summer of 2020 that the government would ensure that all its recovery decisions favor “a new growth model” based on “decarbonization, energy sobriety and green innovations”. “As a rule, politicians talk very little about sobriety”abounds Yves Marignac, “a majority of them remain culturally imbued with a world where sobriety is seen as something negative.” The specialist recalls that Emmanuel Macron, in his long speech presenting the France 2030 plan, supposed to raise the country affected by the health crisis, had thus solemnly launched: “I call on the country to produce more.”
Not only is the notion discreet in public debate, but it is downright discredited by the head of state. “I hear many voices rising to explain to us that we should take up the complexity of contemporary problems by returning to the oil lamp”, mocked Emmanuel Macron in September 2020, challenged by 70 elected officials who demanded a moratorium on 5G. “I do not believe that the Amish model can solve the challenges of contemporary ecology”, he decided. “The return to candles is an old reflex used to discredit the anti-nuclear fight of environmentalists in the 1970s and which has persisted until today”, explains Yves Marignac.
“We simplify, exaggerate and caricature sobriety measures to make them undesirable”, he deciphers. Conversely, still in his speech presenting the France 2030 recovery plan, Emmanuel Macron called for space conquest and exploration of the seabed, potential providers of resources. A dominant discourse that“instead of falling within the planetary limits as scientists clearly identify them today, remains in the idea of pushing them back.” For Bruno Villalba, difficult to scratch “the fantasized imagination of technology”. One “steamroller” cultural, “inseparable from our representation of well-being, the future, innovation, etc.”
Under these conditions, the tracks offered by the “technical solutions” dominate the political discussion on climate change, far ahead of the issue of sobriety. “We are for research and for investing in R&D (research and development), but false solutions are stirred up in the public debate and distract us from what to do now. Not in 2040, not in 2050. Now” , annoys the ecologist Delphine Batho, spokesperson for Yannick Jadot. According to her, this technophile imagination shines the spotlight on the single question of nuclear energy, “a totem” highlighted “to hide the taboo of the essential reduction of energy consumption in France”, she accuses. The former minister is also in favor of a gradual abandonment of the atom.
Therefore, how to introduce into a presidential campaign a concept perceived as outdated and restrictive? “At least it isn’t. It’s for the best”, corrects Delphine Batho. “There is a grassroots movement today of people who aspire to an imaginary other than that of the consumerist, polluting society, in which we live badly.” However, past the environmentalist primary, where sobriety had been debated in the same way as decline, the notion does not break through in this campaign while Yannick Jadot is struggling to put the environment on the menu.
Can this other imaginary only lead to ambitious public policies in a France that has experienced the movement of “yellow vests” in response to the announcement of a carbon tax? “IThere is a progressive recognition of the importance of sobriety by the public authorities, but a taboo to display it as a global orientation”, believes Yves Marignac. As well, “We introduce it in dribs and drabs, on subjects where the executive has the feeling that it can pass.” We thus speak of sobriety in the Law for Green Growth of 2015, the Climate Law of 2021, the law on the circular economy of 2020 or the text on the environmental footprint of digital technology.
Agnès Catoire, who was among the 150 French men and women drawn by lot to participate in the Citizen’s Climate Convention, believes that it is still too little. “The 150 measures that we initially produced were part of this perspective of sobriety in general: digital sobriety, but also advertising sobriety, etc… All these measures formed a coherent whole”she recalls. “The fact that the government only comes to dig into these measures to keep only a few of them has emptied our work of its meaning”, she laments, regretting that the initiative did not allow for a broader debate on our model of society.
Especially since the French can consent to more sobriety “provided that the measures are fair and explained”she believes. “Among us, even those who were shocked by the proposal to limit the speed to 110 km/h [sur les autoroutes] ended up being convinced and realizing that it was a very impactful measure, totally free and very easy to implement”she cites as an example.
“Politicians seem to wait for the spontaneous awareness of citizens to be sufficient to make their action possible”, observes Yves Marignac, but several signals go in the direction of citizens more demanding sobriety than politicians (or at least more demanding than leaders think). In September, a consultation on the future of Europe, which brought together 700 citizens representative of the French population, ended with a conference bringing together again 100 French people drawn by lot. Three “priorities” emerged from these discussions. The first one ? “Develop energy sobriety to consume less by stopping the superfluous.”
They demanded, among other things, a reduction in the European car fleet and the introduction of consumption quotas by sector, underlines Euractiv. From these tracks, “The European Commission will propose ideas, reforms resulting from your contributions. All this will be done in the ‘open sky'”, declared the Secretary of State for European Affairs, Clément Beaune, warning that not everything would be “maybe not taken back”, nor necessarily “right now”.
“Anyway, at some point, we will have no choice but to undergo these measures, concludes Agnès Catoire. We were just suggesting to prepare a little bit and do it gently.”