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Last updated: 08/12/2022
We are mixing green and brown. Environmentally harmful spending, even if described as "occasional," always outweighs green spending in budgets. This short-term reasoning is killing us, warn Bénédicte Peyrol and Géraldine Poivert.
"Spare ourselves the risk of yellow vests tomorrow, and we guarantee a bloom of multicolored vests in the years to come."
The slogan has a nice ring: France, a green nation! But are we in illusion, vision, or action?
Alas, a first answer is provided by the "green budget" presented recently. What do we find there? Green, undeniably, but also brown… it's still brown. So let's clean our brushes and examine the color palette of the "not really green budget" presented by Bercy.
On one hand, spending favorable to the environment has increased by 4.4 billion euros in one year. On the other hand, the increase in spending harmful to the environment, known as "brown," is 9.3 billion euros.
TODAY'S FEARS JEOPARDIZE TOMORROW
Although only part of the increase in this brown spending is explained by the exceptional measures to protect energy consumers, this disproportion in figures is shocking. In 2022, at the time of the global resource fire, we are drowning green in brown! Under pressure from companies, perhaps, and from today's fears, also. Under pressure from the war in Ukraine, Covid, the disorganization of supply chains, all sorts of supposedly temporary factors, certainly. But these fears jeopardize those of tomorrow, which are even more serious.
By failing to scale up investments in clean energy and furnace electrification – companies are experiencing this cruelly today – this leads to their closure, temporary or… permanent. For lack of courage, we are making the same short-term mistake with our resources by undercharging for water pollution, by not investing enough in new materials, by giving up on truly fostering green chemistry, by allowing highly polluting products to enter the European market… Not deciding is moving backward. Spare ourselves perhaps the risk of yellow vests tomorrow, and we guarantee a bloom of multicolored vests in the years and decades to come.
MERGE BUDGETARY AND ECOLOGICAL PLANNING
So what to do? We need to work with companies on truly green budgets and allow or facilitate necessary investments. Finance stranded costs (those that are unrecoverable) indeed, and temporary shields, but with solid counterparts. Dare a "new deal" commensurate with the challenge: we are in the midst of a resource revolution! In model-changing conditions, it is not a few billion but rather a third of our GDP that it is customary to invest!
We need to invest long-term – ensuring that ecological planning is also budgetary planning – in clusters of green ecosystems, preferably territorial, relying on the regions. Stop spreading out aid thinly. France 2030 must demonstrate that the State is capable of this. Shoulder the transition costs of sectors that need to radically transform, with heavy social consequences that cannot be ignored.
INVEST ONLY FOR TOMORROW
Growth will be green or it will not be! It may not be the same as the poorly calculated growth measured by today's GDP. But certainly the one that, one day soon, will include the added value of nature and resources in its calculation and will allow us to measure genuine progress for citizens.
Let's move beyond environmental colorblindness and be happy to invest in the world of tomorrow, the world of ecological and economic champions!
