These are essential documents to enable France to accelerate the energy transition and the fight against climate disruption, which will have concrete consequences on the daily lives of French people in terms of transport, housing and food. The government has put out to public consultation, on Monday, November 4, and until December 15, the two tools for steering the country's climate and energy policy: the third national low-carbon strategy (SNBC) and the third multiannual energy program (PPE). The former looks ahead to 2030, the latter to 2035, and both aim to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.

These roadmaps are highly ambitious, but questions remain as to France's ability to meet them. Their presentation is over a year behind schedule, due to numerous postponements and the dissolution of the Assemblée Nationale in June. In recent months, the French High Council on Climate has repeatedly warned of a "risk of a setback in the ambition of climate policy" if these texts, which had already been the subject of consultations, were not adopted.

"Going faster and further." The SNBC maps out the path toward a reduction in gross greenhouse gas emissions not by 40% but by 50% between 1990 and 2030, a consequence of Europe's new climate ambition. Carbon emissions are to be reduced by around 5% per year between 2022 and 2030, compared with an average annual reduction of 2% between 2017 and 2022.

Despite the good results of 2023 (- 5.8%), there's still a long way to go: France must go from 373 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent (MtéqCO₂), excluding imports, in 2023 to 270 MtéqCO₂ in 2030. Minister for the Green Transition Agnès Pannier-Runacher, who launched the public consultation alongside François Durovray and Olga Givernet, the ministers responsible for transport and energy respectively, acknowledged that "over the last six months, the decline has slowed a little. This may be linked to weather conditions, but it may also be that we're slowing down. So we need to accelerate what has been started."

To achieve this, the government is detailing its "battle plan" sector by sector. In transport, the most polluting sector (one third of emissions), the government wants to cut emissions by 31% between 2022 and 2030, a colossal effort given that they have stagnated to date. It is counting on a number of levers, including the growth of electric vehicles (to reach two-thirds of new vehicle sales); charging stations (400,000 public, compared with 130,000 today); and a sharp increase in public transport (+25%). But also a doubling of rail freight and of the network of bicycle paths (to reach 100,000 kilometers), and a progressively higher carbon pricing of air transport.

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