What is the “ecological debt” that the Prime Minister is talking about and how much do we owe exactly?

“Our roadmap is based on a double requirement. […] Reducing our double debt, budgetary and ecological. And I will tell the truth to the French, […] the truth about the impact of our way of life and our economy on the environment. » From the introduction of his general policy speech to the deputies, Prime Minister Michel Barnier put budgetary debt and ecological debt on the same level.

And if the first is easy for everyone to understand, the second covers a difficult concept to grasp, because a debt supposes having something to repay, a payment to make. Obviously, there is indeed “overshoot day” which tells us on what date each year, humanity begins to live on credit from the resources available to the Earth. But this tells us nothing else about the recorded liabilities that the term debt suggests.

SO, 20 Minutes takes stock of this notion that appeared in the early 1990s and which today covers different realities, economic, political, even philosophical.

An estimate of 500 billion dollars per year

Originally, therefore, the notion of ecological debt theorized a debt that industrialized countries would have towards countries that were then said to be developing. “It’s a specialist term,” introduces Daniel Boy, researcher at Cevipof. “It refers to the fact that industrialized countries, including France, have left quantities of CO2 and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere which have enabled their development to the detriment of the environment, and that they therefore have a debt to humanity. » And these environmental transformations are already weighing on our climate, whose changes first affect the poorest countries.

A “debt”, therefore, that the Frenchwoman Esther Duflo, Nobel Prize winner in economics in 2019, estimated at $500 billion per year, an amount put forward on March 18, 2024 during a conference. But when Michel Barnier evokes this concept of “ecological debt”, the original meaning of which he cannot ignore having been Minister of Ecology from 1993 to 1995, it is not obvious that he means it today in sense of an annual payment that France would make to countries in the South, whose finances are already exhausted. But then, what reality does this term cover?

“A good thing” to put budgetary and ecological debts on the same level

“I don’t find it very appropriate to talk about ecological debt which suggests that we could return to the state before and to make people believe that this can be repaired,” considers Michel Lepetit, vice-president of The Shift Project, a think tank for the transition to a low-carbon economy that he co-founded with Jean-Marc Jancovici. “But rhetorically putting budgetary debt at the same level as ecological debt and if it means that the latter is as important as the first, then that’s a good thing,” adds the polytechnician.

The fact remains that for him “this debt is not one, but it certainly has a cost”. A cost of which France may have already had some tastes, such as the floods last January in Pas-de-Calais, the damage of which was estimated at 640 million euros by insurers.

A debt to forget, a responsibility to shoulder

For Corine Pelluchon, philosopher of ecological existentialism, this term “debt” is not very effective. She prefers the notion of “ecological responsibility.” Because our lifestyles, production and consumption have an impact on our descendants, on nature and on everything that is living,” she explains, before continuing: “Preferring the term responsibility means recognize that all this is not external to our existence. And as long as we do not install responsibility at the heart of our existence, we will remain with these small calculations – what the term debt suggests – and with bureaucratic and technocratic visions of ecology. »

There remains a major problem from a public policy point of view: “Sobriety does not have very good press with voters and the public,” underlines political scientist Daniel Boy. For him, France’s commitments in terms of reducing its emissions, notably established by the Paris Agreements, are “a form of recognition of this debt”. Although behind on its commitments, France has nevertheless recorded a regular decline in its greenhouse gas emissions in recent years (-5.8% in 2023 compared to 2022).

The temptation of the freerider

And 196 signatory countries of the Paris Agreements have committed to doing the same, a problem well known to economists and sociologists of collective mobilizations is emerging: even if France, which today accounts for 4% of global emissions , “was on time in his objectives, would this change the face of the world? », asks Daniel Boy.

And many countries find themselves in the same situation, especially when pursuing a goal as distant as carbon neutrality by 2050. Therefore, the temptation to hope that others will make the efforts in its place is strong . A behavior that economists and sociologists have theorized as “the free rider problem [freerider problem] “.

In other words, if in a social struggle 90% of employees go on strike and accept their demands, the 10% who did not play the game, the “free riders” will still benefit from the benefits obtained. And there is ultimately no reason why the same should not be true for the environment, especially in an economy where countries are in competition with each other and where not acting can be dangerous. immediately prove to be a competitive advantage.

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