The two notes were published a few months apart, each with a certain impact. In one, billions of euros to spend, in the other a plan. Two distinct strategies to deal with the climate crisis: the first, written by the economist Jean Pisani-Ferry for France Strategy, an organization attached to Matignon, puts forward a figure for the investments necessary in France to decarbonize the economy – 70 billion d euros per year.
The second, a « plan de transformation » produced by the think tank The Shift Project, an activist organization founded by climate experts, first proposes an inventory of available natural resources, then a plan to optimize their consumption in each sector, speaking “tons, watts, people and skills”. No money, who “is never an input to the problem” in “a limiting factor” according to the document. “At the Shift, we do not calculate in eurossummarizes Michel Lepetit, engineer for the organization. The number one constraint is physical. »
In climate matters, economists and scientists have been speaking two different languages for thirty years. The former, convinced of the power of the market, approach the subject through prices, the only ones capable, in their eyes, of giving value to natural resources and of modifying human behavior – when prices rise, individuals are supposed to seek solutions. of substitution. The latter, like good physicists, generally approach it through quantities, the finiteness of the planet being an insurmountable constraint, while money is created and printed at will, as the last economic crises have shown.
“Every time you have to manage less, there are only two options, by prices or by quantities, summarized the founder of the Shift Project, Jean-Marc Jancovici, on France Inter, in November 2022. The system by quantities is fairer than the one in which we manage by prices. » Clearly, wealthy households will always manage to pay the price of a rare resource, even if it increases under the effect of a carbon tax that is supposed to guide their consumer choices. The only way to restore a form of equity in the transition is to ration resources by planning – by granting, for example, to each a limited number of plane trips to use over a lifetime, as proposed by Jean-Marc Jancovici.
Virulent criticism
These divisions are found in the political sphere, between supporters of degrowth, for whom growth and resources are fundamentally correlated, and defenders of “green growth”, for whom it is possible to create wealth while reducing greenhouse gas emissions – Europe has reduced its emissions by 30% since 1990. Each of these communities tends to judge the other remote from reality, a prisoner of its own ideological or even unrealistic framework. “The places for dialogue between disciplines are not so numerous”regrets Jean Pisani-Ferry.
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