“The word sobriety is now on everyone’s lips, from Elisabeth Borne to the boss of Medef”

VSt is a little sentence that went unnoticed, pronounced Monday, August 29 at the end of the day. “Sobriety certainly aims to get through the winter, but it is above all the sine qua non of reducing our carbon footprint by 2050”, launched Agnès Pannier-Runacher in front of an audience of business leaders gathered for the Medef summer school at the Longchamp racecourse. A term far from insignificant on the part of the new Minister of Energy Transition, who has just spent four years at Bercy.

“Sobriety”: the word is dropped. And it is now on everyone’s lips, from the Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, who urged companies to put in place energy saving plans, under penalty of suffering from “rationing”to the boss of the Medef, Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux, who openly said he was in favor of a “sober growth”. Via the Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire on Tuesday, who launched a strong call for “everyone, not just companies”in order to “be more sober”.

The tone has changed

The same Bruno Le Maire, however, early Marchassured: “The Minister of the Economy is not there to say: you must do this or you must do that. » A position in line with the principles which were for a long time those of Emmanuel Macron, a supporter of free enterprise and free choice, wishing to offer his fellow citizens ” happy Days ” and to embody a form of hope in the face of extremes, the Head of State having long assimilated sobriety and decline. He mocked the “amish pattern” opponents of 5G, in September 2020. If he uttered the word “sobriety” for the first time in February, in his speech in Belfort, he hastened to add that in no case should the connect to“energy austerity. »

Six months later, the tone has changed. The repercussions of the war in Ukraine, the energy crisis and the ever-increasing urgency of the climate transition have radically changed the situation: it is by announcing “the end of abundance” that the Head of State has launched his comeback. In the meantime, even the big companies got involved: on June 26, the bosses of the three French energy companies (TotalEnergies, EDF, Engie) signed in the JDD a common forum to call for a “awareness”. They advocated “a collective and individual action so that each of us – each consumer, each company – changes its behavior and immediately limits its energy consumption”. A way, too, to buy a responsible image, and to push the public authorities to take their part.

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