# Who’s Afraid of the Great Transition? **Date de l'événement :** 01/11/2025 * Publié le 01/11/2025 ### Date 01/11/2025 ## Chapô **More than a denial of reality, resistance to climate action stems from the high political cost of changing a socioeconomic model based on fossil fuels, with the automotive industry playing a central role. The emerging climate coalition, which is mainly recruited from the wealthy, urban and educated classes, is struggling to make itself heard. As long as the large sectors of society remain dependent on fossil fuels, the idea of a just transition will not gain traction.** ## Corps du texte Climate policies have faced significant setbacks over the past few months. The latest election results in France and other European countries, as well as those at the European Union level and in the United States, indicate that the governments of major liberal democracies are not receiving an explicit mandate to lead the change that scientists consider essential. In France, rollbacks have impacted low-emission zones, aid for thermal renovation of buildings, and public support for industrial decarbonisation. In Europe, the Green Deal, launched in 2020 by European Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen, has lost much of the support it had and has been significantly scaled back. In the United States, the return of Donald Trump to the White House in January 2025 and the subsequent blows to investment in decarbonisation are the most striking manifestations of what is now commonly framed as a backlash against climate policies. Climate policy advocates often interpret these failures and setbacks as triumphs of irrationality and misinformation or expressions of an inability to translate the imperatives of scientific research, which transcend political divides and have universal value, into political action. At major international conferences, calls to mobilise and define common objectives (reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, plastic pollution, deforestation, etc.) are mainstays of green diplomacy, making the gap between promises and actions more evident by the day. An economic model at the root of resistance ------------------------------------------- However, this backlash must be understood in order to move forward and no longer settle for underscoring the powerlessness of transformative forces and desperate appeals, be they radical or reasonable. To grasp the failures and setbacks of climate action is a crucial political test, providing a measure of what is at stake in the transition. The widely held narrative of a necessary but impossible ecological revolution, which appeals to voluntarism, humanitarianism, trust in science and international agreements, and social mobilisation against the interests of the few, has the disadvantage of artificially separating two dimensions of the debate. On the one hand is the establishment of environmental goals (emission targets, for example). On the other is the effective transformation of society as a producer and consumer of goods and resources that make our economic model unsustainable. This implicit narrative is shared by legitimate actors in decision-making spheres and by large sections of the movement against the fossil-fuel industry, which generally limits action to denouncing the industry’s (very real) influence on finance, and to calling for divestment. The most important limit to this interpretation is that it fails to explain the reasons for the wait-and-see attitude and resistance to change that permeate society. More broadly, it fails to convey the objective difficulty of breaking free from an economic and commercial model that, while harmful to the habitability of the planet, remains hegemonic. This hegemony has deep historical roots and owes its persistence to its ability to channel hopes for growth, social integration and economic security. Yet it is precisely this hegemony that must be questioned in order for the point of the transition to become clear. A crisis in energy systems -------------------------- The climate crisis is primarily a crisis within the energy systems and infrastructure that shape our daily lives as workers, consumers, transport and city users and, more generally, our sense of freedom. Since the end of World War II, industrial societies have been based on a socioeconomic pact largely predicated on the massive use of energy, particularly fossil fuels, with the automobile playing a central role. The auto industry is the linchpin of employment, growth, urban and peri-urban development and energy dependence. Major agreements between the state, capital and trade unions were forged around it during the Fordist era of mass production and consumption. Beyond the automobile, and despite the spread of electric cars, fossil fuels still account for around 80 per cent of the global energy mix. They are responsible for climate change and, indirectly, for most of the environmental damage attributable to their role in the production system. They have become the pillars of democratic capitalism, particularly in the West during the period of rapid and relatively egalitarian growth known in France as the _Trente Glorieuses_ (the glorious thirty-year post-war boom), which was first shaken by the oil crises of the 1970s. The economic model of these three decades, combining rapid growth, fiscal compromise and social protection, which obviously resulted from social struggles, would have been unthinkable without the global infrastructure that has long supplied energy to industrial regions. Hence the profound dilemma at the root of the global ecological crisis and its apparent ungovernability: these energy forms enabled a vast middle class to enjoy a high level of material well-being, education and protection; yet they are the cause of present and future disasters. > _80 % of the global energy mix consists of fossil fuels._ The centrality of energy in the Fordist social compromise, and in what remains of it in the new neoliberal compromise that has succeeded Fordism, largely explains the difficulty of transitioning to a new energy and industrial model compatible with global sustainability. Many studies show that resistance to change is not so much a matter of poor understanding of climate science or outright rejection of environmental goals. Rather, the change carries a real social risk to different segments of society. The gradual phasing out of this technical and economic regime involves job losses, higher fuel prices and various regulatory constraints  (building renovation, for example) that hit the most fragile budgets hardest. As economists Jean Pisani-Ferry and Selma Mahfouz have emphasised, the transition carries a significant cost, and not all have the same capacity to bear it. Deep social divisions over transition measures ---------------------------------------------- An opinion poll conducted by political scientist Jean-Yves Dormagen and his institute, Cluster17, shows that a vast majority of the French population agrees with the need to take action against climate change. There is also fairly broad consensus on the principle of a just transition. However, the same study shows that effective transition measures, which most affect mobility and choice of residence, can create very deep social divides. While a section of the population that is more progressive, pro-European and generally economically secure is willing to make the necessary concessions, social groups for whom symbolic or material attachment to traditional consumption patterns remains significant, are much less inclined to do so. Another study, conducted by economists Antonin Pottier and Emmanuel Combet, indicates that social groups with modest incomes (and not necessarily the lowest) spend a high share of their budget on energy due to geographical factors (distance from the workplace) and infrastructure (poorly insulated housing, old vehicles) and are therefore more severely harmed by carbon taxes and transition measures in general. These same social groups are disproportionately affected by the industrial upheavals currently unfolding: the closure of obsolete factories, energy price inflation since 2022, difficulties in the green sectors of solar, wind and batteries, and poor job quality in these fragile emerging sectors subject to regulatory instability. A more systematic study conducted in the United States by Thomas Oatley reveals that Donald Trump’s voters, when he first came to power in 2016, lived in the regions most affected by industrial changes linked to climate imperatives. The closure of coal mines and part of the US manufacturing sector, whether due to environmental regulations or Chinese competition, mobilised voters who see themselves as the losers of the transition, in the same way that they previously saw themselves as the losers of globalisation and automation. These studies shed light on the historical process of hollowing out the industrial middle class through several factors: neoliberal reforms and increased international competition; the very strong political polarisation between the losers and winners of the transition (the latter tending to live in large urban centres and being among the most highly educated and best protected against economic shocks); and the electoral benefits of discontent with the transition reaped by conservative political parties willing to do anything to maintain the fossil fuel status quo. These parties, backed by the socioeconomic elites directly involved in the fossil fuel economy (the zealots behind the ‘Drill, Baby, Drill!’ slogan of the Republican Party during the 2008 presidential campaign, repeated _ad nauseam_ by Donald Trump in 2024), have been able to forge an electoral alliance with the lower middle class, trapped in declining industries and fighting to defend their interests. This research uncovers the reality of the backlash against climate policies. It is mainly due to the high political cost of changing the technological and industrial model, not to mention the changes that must simultaneously be made to individual consumption patterns. The political cost of the transition is high because, in the current institutional and economic context, many people are exposed to immediate socioeconomic risks, to the point that they prefer to downplay or even deny the climate risk itself. We also know that the most vulnerable social groups are those that have the most to lose from the damage caused by the global ecological crisis, at both the national and global level. Faced with the uncertainty surrounding the emergence of a new economic regime aligned with climate imperatives, these threats seem secondary. They are perceived as long-term issues because the immediate benefits of adopting a carbon-neutral lifestyle, although real, are rarely highlighted in political discourse and policy proposals. From the fossil fuel coalition to a climate coalition ----------------------------------------------------- All these dynamics call for analysis of the climate issue through the lens of social coalitions. The post-war Fordist compromise first established a central coalition forged around fossil fuels within the structures of modern civilisation: captains of industry seeking profit, workers seeking better wages and social protection, and the state seeking stability and power. All found their balance thanks to abundant and cheap energy, which made a partial convergence of interests possible. The gradual disintegration of this coalition during the period of deindustrialisation and destabilisation of public finances took on new proportions with the climate crisis. By making fossil fuels a long-term risk to be eliminated, the climate crisis tends to create new vulnerabilities. The vulnerable include the working class and, more generally, segments of society that are highly dependent on cheap fossil fuels. They also include traditional industrial interests (typically the extractive and automotive sectors), the profitability and technological relevance of which remain linked to this energy model. We are witnessing the death throes of the old fossil fuel coalition: once central, it is now being pushed to the margins in a context of normative and technological transformation, and is fighting to preserve its interests and status. Meanwhile, what could be called a climate coalition is emerging, bringing together different social segments that are sufficiently protected and economically and symbolically stable to partake in a new material and institutional regime. This coalition remains a social minority, however. It struggles to impose its views, pace and values on the rest of society. Culturally, it is often locked into battles that are lost before they begin, as we have seen recently in France with regard to meat consumption, major sporting events, and other popular behaviours detrimental to climate. In other words, the climate coalition is not in a position of cultural or economic hegemony. It is also caught in a dilemma, or contradiction, that drastically limits its potential for political action. Climate action advocates can certainly present themselves as a social vanguard insofar as they defend interests that transcend them, embodying a universally valid movement towards new infrastructures, new practices, and perhaps new values that are compatible with the general interest. But if they are recruited only from among the immediate winners (graduates, urban dwellers, those able to finance their transition, or even derive symbolic benefit from their new lifestyle) and if they can only benefit from their situation at the expense of other social groups reduced to fossil fuel dependency, then the very idea of a just transition collapses, giving way to a conflict between a minority of winners and a majority of losers from the change. The central challenge for climate policy is therefore to broaden the climate coalition. This can only be achieved through industrial and commercial choices, social protection measures, investment in research and vocational training. The broadening therefore requires a set of measures based on very profound political changes, such as taking back control of part of the financial sector and directly confronting certain established social interests, in particular the automotive lobby. Only by broadening the climate coalition to include new social groups that are currently excluded from it will it be possible to connect the universal realm of climate issues, which are always at risk of remaining abstract and ineffective, with the realm of socioeconomic power relations, divisions of interests and ideologies – in other words, where the formation of a just, solid and sustainable compromise is at stake. **References:** * Aklin, M. and Mildenberger, M. 2020. ‘Prisoners of the Wrong Dilemma. Why Distributive Conflict, Not Collective Action, Characterises the Politics of Climate Change’, _Global Environmental Politics_, 20 (4), 2020, pp. 4–27, * Aykut, S. C. and Dahan, A. 2015. _Governing the Climate: Twenty Years of International Negotiations_, Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, * Beaussier, A.-L., Chevalier, T. and Palier, B. 2024. ‘Who Bears the Cost of Environmental Transition? Considering Inequalities in the Face of Social Risks Linked to Climate Change’, _Revue française des_ _affaires sociales_, 73 (1), 2024, p. 207, * Charbonnier, P. 2025. _La Coalition climat. Travail, planète et politique au xxie siècle_, Paris : Seuil, * High Council for Climate. 2025. _Reviving Climate Action in the Face of Worsening Impacts and Weakening Leadership. Annual Report_, Paris: High Council for Climate, * Oatley, T. 2023. ‘The Dual Economy, Climate Change, and the Polarisation of American Politics’, _Socio-Economic Review_, 3 October 2023, * Rodríguez-Pose, A. and Federico Bartalucci, F. 2024. ‘The Green Transition and its Potential Territorial Discontents’, _Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society_, 17 (2), 2024, pp. 339–358. **_This article was originally published in Conférence issue No. 4, titled "[Facing the Environmental Challenge](https://www.calameo.com/sciencespo/read/0041604547f5e00dcf173)", a publication that sheds light on major contemporary issues and informs public and private decision makers._** ### Thématique `#Environnement` **Langue :** `#Anglais` --- ### Navigation pour IA - [Index de tous les contenus](https://conference.sciencespo.fr/llms.txt) - [Plan du site (Sitemap)](https://conference.sciencespo.fr/sitemap.xml) - [Retour à l'accueil](https://conference.sciencespo.fr/)