Le Figaro Magazine: "Ecologisme: le piège de la décroissance" (Ecologism: the trap of degrowth)

In his general policy statement last Tuesday, Michel Barnier announced his intention to "develop in a pragmatic and differentiated way the 'zero net artificialisation' regulation to meet the essential needs of industry and housing". He also promised to continue developing renewable energies, but "by better measuring all their impacts". The Prime Minister didn't mention wind turbines, but the MPs he spoke to understood that they were directly concerned. Especially the ecologist MPs, who howled along with NGOs such as Greenpeace, WWF France and Réseau Action Climat. And with good reason: not since Nicolas Sarkozy's famous "l'environnement, ça commence à bien faire!" during his presidential visit to the Salon de l'Agriculture in 2010 has anyone at the top of the State allowed themselves such a departure from the green doxa when it comes to ecology. Michel Barnier is no climate skeptic. Nor is Jean de Kervasdoué. Director General of Hospitals under François Mitterrand, long-time holder of the chair of economics and management of health services at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers (Cnam) and member of the Académie des technologies, this agricultural engineer by training does not deny climate disruption, but sets out to demonstrate, book after book, that the remedies proposed by the "décroissantists" are worse than the evil. Right from the preamble to La Grande Mystification, his latest book, he sums up the insoluble equation facing the world's leading leaders since 2015, when they unanimously adopted the Paris Agreement's goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050: "Humanity must reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. It won't, even if the French only flew four times in their lifetime. The poorest countries, too, will use and abuse fossil fuels, leaving Europeans to battle against the rising tide of greenhouse gases. It will engulf them. As for the nature they want to preserve, it never existed." One of the latest studies on the impact of the Paris agreement, carried out in 2023 by the very serious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), estimates that to reduce emissions at the rate it imposes, we would have to sacrifice between 8% and 18% of the world's annual GDP by 2050, and 11% to 13% per year by 2100!

Jean de Kervasdoué is hated by the Greens for his relentless fight against degrowth, "the paradigm of political ecology, with its false solutions and preconceived ideas", which "does nothing to resolve real ecological issues, but greatly reduces the purchasing power of the French". In LaGrande Mystification, his intimate knowledge of the state apparatus enables him to dismantle the mechanisms by which this ideology, which is fatal to our Western societies, has gained a foothold in the French and European political and media spheres, in defiance of scientific reality. He recounts how Élisabeth Borne, Prime Minister and former chief of staff to Ségolène Royal, Minister of Ecology, has organized "a compulsory catechesis for all senior civil servants" in 2022: "Evangelization begins with those who have the most power: directors of central administration, members of ministerial cabinets, prefects... then the missionaries must reach 25,000 civil servants." Ecologist entryism in the upper echelons of the administration explains how the State apparatus has been able to give birth to provisions with such deleterious economic and social consequences as the zero net artificialisation (ZAN) plan, to which Michel Barnier has just struck a first blow. ZAN is the flagship measure of the 2021 Climate and Resilience Act, which transposes the main conclusions of the Citizens' Climate Convention. An "operetta pseudo-democracy", says the economist, who exposes networks set up within the State itself. He cites, for example, the association Le Lierre, created in 2019, which presents itself as "the ecologist network of professionals in public action". Le Lierre campaigns for the "immediate implementation" of ZAN. Jean de Kervasdoué writes: "A visit to the association's website reveals that while some of the notes are unsigned, others are signed by active civil servants. Clearly, civil servants' right of reserve does not apply when they are preaching the holy word."

His observations tie in with those of another book, published on September 19, on the excesses of political ecology: Les Illusionnistes, co-authored by our Le Point colleagues Géraldine Woessner and Erwan Seznec*. For them too, ZAN is "a textbook case" of the instrumentalization of ecology to serve a single objective: "Rationing the earth" by organizing "an artificial shortage of space". "The real aim of ZAN is to put an end to the era of the single-family home", they assert, recalling that in 2021, Emmanuelle Wargon, then Minister for Housing, described this type of housing as "ecological, economic and social nonsense". This statement obviously provoked an outcry, and the Minister was quick to backtrack, but the ZAN was not called into question, even though many local councillors were already denouncing its disastrous consequences for housing and economic activity.

It's only logical that degrowth ideology should spread to international institutions. Géraldine Woessner and Erwan Seznec point out that ZAN is a French avatar of the European Commission's non-binding strategy to achieve "zero net soil artificialisation" by 2050. The most renowned agencies are not spared, such as the International Energy Agency (IEA), which Jean de Kervasdoué points out "never ceases to err in mistaking its desires for realities" when it publishes its forecasts, on world coal demand for example. Banning combustion engines, demonizing megabasins and GMOs, predicting the extinction of species...: for these authors, no subject is taboo. Even if, as Jean de Kervasdoué notes, "today, it's obvious that the simple fact of evoking the need for these scientific debates has the direct effect of producing a definitive media excommunication in the majority of the media of bien-pensance". It's a safe bet that there will be very little mention of these two books on the public broadcasting service, a temple if ever there was one to ecological correctness, which Les Illusionnistes treats with particular delight.