A Green Marshall Plan

So we need a bit of dirigisme?
We might not like it. But if means are too dispersed, if intentions are unfocused, if there isn't a road map, we won't get there. So we have to mobilize the means, as in a time of major crisis. We need a Marshall Plan.

What would this Marshall Plan look like?
It's a mobilization of means, like for the financial crisis. It's the principle of sorting the necessary from the superfluous. We can find billions in the space of a few weeks for the financial crisis, but not a few hundred million dollars to reduce poverty or to protect ecosystems. So it's a change of priorities. And it's a new global means of governance so that there are common rules at the world level on the environment and everything connected to it—agriculture, commerce. The ecological crisis impacts all the other crises. It aggravates poverty, creates geopolitical tensions, hurts our economies.

How can world leaders better bridge the link between the economy and ecology?
Some economists have courageously said this economic crisis could amplify if we forget the whole economy historically rests on the appropriation of natural resources. If these natural resources disappeared, no economy could resist. So if it doesn't ascribe a value to them, our economy sooner or later will collapse. We need new indicators that take ecological reality into account.

The Grenelle suggested putting a price on biodiversity. Critics decry pricing life.
We need to put a value on the so-called free services we benefit from. If we don't put a value on all that, we don't realize the prejudice. Just as Nicholas Stern priced action and inaction on climate change, we must put a price on protecting biodiversity and the economic prejudice of letting biodiversity go up in smoke. What does it represent economically if tomorrow such and such insect disappears and x number of plants can't be pollinated because of it? What does it represent if fish stocks disappear from oceans?

Concretely, how can the new green economy create jobs and growth and be profitable?
We have to put it another way: If we do nothing, the current economy will collapse. We'll have to develop a circular economy: reducing our use of limited resources, prolonging the lifespan of what we use and manufacture, and recycling to close the material loop. That demands an enormous number of services, so that's jobs. Renovating buildings, manufacturing renewable energies, are new fountains of jobs.

And we'll have to move toward "selective growth"—choosing what is compatible with environmental and energy realities, with the physical reality of the world. Until now in our democracies, we didn't ask any questions. Whatever we wanted to do, we did. Anything we wanted, we could have. Well, that's finished in the 21st century.

© 2008