What is the future of the multi-annual programming of energy (EPP), the roadmap of the public authorities, the project, over 300 pages in all, was published on 25 January? We know its purpose: decline of an operational strategy low-carbon for the ten years to come, with as major objective to reduce the CO2 emissions of more than 220 million tonnes. For this, an ecological tax structure has been developed, but it was severely heckled by the social crisis, to the point that the government has frozen all the guidelines in this sense. And then appeared the great debate, with a section on the environment. In short, how these two main folders, public consultation on the one hand and the EPP on the other hand, will they mix?
“To reduce the attractiveness of liquid fuels fossil (gasoline and diesel), the taxation of carbon should therefore be “slightly” but “surely” deterrent, ” notes Guillaume de Rubercy, a lawyer at the Paris Bar. Unfortunately, it is the pressure of the “yellow vests” that was fatal to its initial trajectory, and nobody knows today whether the government will attempt to deliver the price of carbon on the table of the great national debate: gold, without the high price of carbon, no climate policy can only be effective and the EPP does not derogate from the rule, seeing off one of its major objectives.”
The role of nuclear power
Guillaume de Rubercy note also that questions very general questions about the consultative platform of the great debate – such as “What would it take according to you to provide answers to climate change?” and “What could make France to share its choices in terms of environment at european and international level” – are able to disrupt the situation: “These themes could, depending on the proposals which would be made in response, influence the government in its synthesis could modify the trajectories for the power sector laid down by the EPP.”
In the background, there is of course the role of nuclear power in the electricity mix French. Guillaume de Rubercy not procrastinating: “The priority remaining to reduce the consumption of energy, including the law of energy transition foresees the division by two in 2050, it would not be appropriate for this time of the grand national debate would benefit from questions of all kinds about the place of nuclear energy in the energy mix, under the pretext that things are understood, shared and accepted by all.” And the lawyer for anchoring the nail in recalling that these issues were already the subject of a public debate in the framework of the preparation of the EPP, and that the text of 360 pages has now entered its consultation phase (environmental Authority, the national Council of energy transition…), including with neighbouring countries for a “consistency”.
