At the end of his life, Bruno Latour became a little more prescient. Especially on how to fight against global warming. “It is because the obvious nature of the threat will not make us change that we must prepare to redo politics”assumes the sociologist and philosopher during one of his conferences, transcribed in his book Facing Gaia (La Découverte, The Preventers of Thinking in Circles, 2015).
In September 2020, two years before his death, he even erected on France Inter a parallel between the ongoing epidemic of Covid-19 and the climate crisis. “You add microbes to one society, you have another society. You add the CO2you have another company”he asserted, before comparing the pandemic to a « crash test ».
“It’s interesting to see that the state is perfectly capable of imposing lots of somewhat unpleasant regulations on us on the health issue, but on other issues, much more important in the long term, it does not have this ability to prohibit doing this or that (…). There is a huge political difference between the two. »
Like Bruno Latour, many climatologists and ecologists believe that global warming has such impacts that it forces us to rethink the political system.
Two aspects in particular agitate them: governance, but also taxation, to fight against the feeling of climate injustice. “Governance is the key issue of the transition. Once the awareness has been made, how do we articulate all of this? How are we going in the same direction? », asks Quentin Perrier, economist, president of Expertises Climat, who accompanied the work of the Citizens’ Convention for the Climate (CCC). A risk perfectly identified by the current executive. “It is collective action by definition. Our duty is to mobilize all strata, and the State is an actor, certainly important, but one actor among many others. Alone, we will not succeed”summarizes Antoine Pellion, Secretary General for Ecological Planning (SGPE), attached to Matignon.
While the transition will upset all sectors of economic and social life, the great risk, according to many specialists, would be to give the impression that things are imposed from above, from a distant and poorly identified centre. From Paris, for example. The social movement of “yellow vests” was a warning signal.
“Blow to the head”
Hence the imperative to better associate several levels, such as local elected officials, citizens, experts… In short, to make a Ve Republic criticized for its verticality and its Jacobinism. “The entire political system and state apparatus is oriented around patriarchal presidentialism, disconnected from the field, and local elected officials. This brings a verticality which is inoperative when the top is not green enough”deplores Delphine Batho, ecologist deputy of Deux-Sèvres and former minister of ecology.
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