Sobriety. It is 2022 and, faced with the energy crisis caused by the war in Ukraine, the word is on everyone’s lips, even becoming for a time a priority of the French government. Since then, the idea has become more discreet and appeared very little during the electoral sequence in June. Why do this concept and the measures it encompasses arouse so much resistance? Pierre Charbonnier, philosopher, co-founder and representative of the Building Ecology collective, which publishes Towards the ecology of war: An environmental history of peace (La Découverte, 324 pages, 23 euros), discusses this notion with Yamina Saheb, a researcher at Sciences Po, specialist in climate change mitigation policies and energy efficiency.
buildings, co-author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Panel III report and founder of the World Sufficiency Lab.
How did the notion of sobriety gradually become a part of public debate in France, and why does it seem to have been neglected today?
Yamina Saheb: Let us first note that France is the only country that refers to “sobriety.” In fact, the term is typically French, including sufficiency is considered the English equivalent. It was a French association, négaWatt, which published in 2003 the first energy transition scenario that included the use of forms of sobriety, demonstrating that this would be essential for the energy transition. The idea then influenced public debate, until the vote, under the presidency of François Hollande, of the energy transition law of 2015, whose text included the requirement of sobriety, a world first, although the legislator was careful not to define the concept.
The latter has gained even more publicity; then, in 2022, the IPCC’s sixth synthesis report on climate change mitigation was published, in which we introduced the notion of sobriety for the first time. Finally, faced with the energy crisis caused by the Russian invasion war in Ukraine, President Emmanuel Macron took up the concept of sobriety; he could also draw on the 2015 law for this, except that, until recently, the French conception of sobriety was the same. It was not based on notions of equity or social justice and therefore aroused reluctance among the population.
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