“Continue the ecological transition” while operating a “recalibration of aid” (understand a drop). This is the proposal from Michel Barnier’s government in the finance bill (PLF) for 2025, presented this Thursday, October 10. Many questions and multiple gray areas remain on this roadmap, but the first elements seem to tend towards a single reality: the sacralization of the “green budget”, the beneficiary of an unprecedented envelope for 2024 which showed the way, will not last not in 2025. The PLF envisages an increase of 2.77 billion euros in credits in favor of the “Ecology mission”, that which concerns expenditure linked to the climate, biodiversity, energy, risk prevention and transport. But this sum is well below the envelopes released a year ago (for example, the budgets devoted to green competitiveness and mobility included in the PLF 2024 alone exceed the 2.77 billion euros announced) . According to a table provided to the press relating to the “total effort” to provide to curb spending but which is not the “real budget”, the executive intends above all to find 1.9 billion savings in the field of the environment. Three aids in favor of the ecological transition are in the viewfinder, some of which have already been the subject of cuts during this year.
“Unsurprisingly given the budgetary situation, the 2025 draft budget is disappointing for ecological planning, reacts Damien Demailly, deputy director of the Institute of Economics for Climate I4CE. If expenditures for the ecological transition are increasing, it is due to the fall in electricity prices which mechanically pushes State expenditure for renewable electricity upwards. [qui est obligé, de par ses engagements contractuels passés, de compenser la baisse de revenus des producteurs éoliens et solaires quand le prix de l’électricité baisse, ndlr]. The cuts made at the start of the year in other sectors are, however, confirmed and new ones are proposed, at the risk of halting the positive dynamic at work for climate investments.”
First victim of the “curtailment of spending” desired by the new government: MaPrimeRénov. Already in February, the government of Gabriel Attal, in search of 10 billion euros in savings, had chosen to cut by one billion euros, in 2024, this system of aid for the energy renovation of housing , considered ineffective as it stands by the executive (not enough requests from individuals, lack of support for the work, etc.). Michel Barnier seems to want to protect this drop for next year. In the file provided to the press, the amount of the envelope displayed for 2025 is 2.5 billion euros in payment credits. “If we compare the amount of MaPrimRénov 2025 compared to that of 2023, you are still up by 900 million euros”we try to reassure the Bercy side. In a report published this summer, the NGO Oxfam France pointed out the “insufficient efforts” of State support for the 5.2 million thermal sieves in the country.
“The cost of inaction”
As feared, the “green fund” is also losing feathers. Announced by Elisabeth Borne (then head of government) during the hellish and extraordinary summer of 2022, the latter is exclusively intended to finance the ecological transition of communities. Touted by the executive as the main tool to accelerate virtuous projects and “local”, its envelope goes from 2.5 billion euros to 1 billion. As with MaPrimeRénov, at the beginning of 2024, the government decided to withdraw 400 million euros from this fund. The planing therefore continues, in ever greater proportions (this is a drop of 60% compared to the appropriations voted in the 2024 finance law). “It’s a bad signal, commented on Wednesday on TFI, the former Minister of Ecological Transition, Christophe Béchu, anticipating this arbitration. The problem with ecology is that we never talk about the cost of inaction. Except that if we don’t invest, for example, to prevent the rise of the oceans and the erosion of the coastline, what it will cost us in the end, if we do nothing, it will be ten times more expensive for the public finances.”
The third “ecological aid” affected by the cuts desired by the government concerns bonuses for the purchase of electric vehicles (the famous bonus), necessary to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the territory (the transport sector represents today 34% of national emissions). In the PLF 2025, the executive wants to reduce the amount of this financial support for clean cars by a third – from the 1.5 billion euros included in the PLF 2024, there is now only one billion.
