While the trash cans were burning in the streets of Paris following the government’s activation of this famous article 49.3 to pass the pension reform bill, two interesting sequences played out in Parliament last week. The first, very media-friendly, took place in the National Assembly, with the hearings carried out within the framework of the commission of inquiry on energy sovereignty. This will have demonstrated that it is possible, in the country of the Enlightenment, to pass, without any impact study, a law that undermines energy security, weakens an industrial sector with no other justification than a political alliance of circumstance.
The second took place in the Senate: without fanfare, the senators adopted a senatorial initiative text, the fruit of several months of discreet cross-partisan work, on the objective of zero net artificialisation (ZAN). Far from the eyes of the media, this very technical proposal corrects the provisions of the climate-resilience law aimed at reducing and then prohibiting the artificialization of soils by 2050. How can we explain that, less than two years after the promulgation of this law resulting from work of the citizens’ convention, the senators had to put back on the job a text that had nevertheless been scrutinized by parliamentary debate? The reason is simple: the law is inapplicable because it did not take into account the concrete realities on the ground. It means in fact, for many municipalities, giving up welcoming new inhabitants and new activities, perpetuating in a part of rural France a trend towards depopulation.
An area larger than that of Monaco
The senators also pointed to a major inconsistency in this Malthusian policy that is the ZAN: it is largely incompatible with the strong desire for reindustrialization carried by the State. Thus, against the advice of the government, they have provided that projects of interest for national or European economic sovereignty are not deducted from the quota of land available to the municipalities to artificialize the soil. Here again, it is the land that speaks: for example, the land necessary for the establishment of a manufacturing plant for electric batteries is, at a minimum, the equivalent of the footprint of the Flins plant in its heyday, i.e. 237 hectares (of which 67 are occupied by buildings), an area larger than that of Monaco…
Thus, the giga-factory of Tesla near Berlin occupies 300 hectares including 227,000 square meters of buildings! And it will be nice to convince ourselves that the old industrial wastelands will be enough to accommodate the new green industry: nothing is less certain. While the ability of France, like its European neighbors, to accommodate these industrial projects is already weighed down by the rise in energy prices, adding such an obstacle is, at the very least, masochistic. What is true of the ZAN is also true of the establishment of low emission zones (ZFE), these perimeters of city centers prohibited to the most polluting vehicles: many municipalities continue to postpone the application of this law .
What does this legislative instability, these renunciations, these alterations tell us? Firstly, having given up using this unique justice of the peace, the price of carbon, to lead the transition towards carbon neutrality, we are condemned to the legislative and regulatory tool, with its complexities and cumbersomeness. Then, when the law is no longer the reflection of the social contract but of ideology, it becomes a tool of planned obsolescence, which inevitably smashes against the wall of reality. Finally, the legislator of 2023 would benefit from not forgetting what the legislator of 2022, 2021, etc. did. Passing measures limiting the land available for the construction of housing, thus increasing the cost of land at the time of the entry into force of the new environmental regulations on new buildings decided several years ago, against a background of rising prices of raw materials… and build a social time bomb. “The legislator […] must not lose sight of the fact that laws are made for men, and not men for laws; that they must be adapted to the character, habits, and situation of the people for whom they are made; that we must be sober with new legislation.” The French have responded to the injunction of energy sobriety. And if the legislator, following the good advice of Portalis, did the same?