Climate and growth: the prize-winning economist is right, but who foots the bill is still open

According to Le Monde, which publishes a column by Adrien Bilal, winner of the 2026 Prix du meilleur jeune économiste (a French prize for the best young economist under 40), the damage caused by global warming is considerable: it erodes growth and, with it, France's fiscal room for manoeuvre. The economist argues that cutting our CO₂ emissions remains profitable even without the cooperation of the rest of the world, and that growth is not the enemy of climate policy, "it is quite the reverse". We have only access to the summary of the column: neither the figures, nor the assumptions, nor the financing arrangements are known to us. What follows is therefore our reading, not the author's.

First observation: the argument is an argument about profitability. Climate is treated as a cost item to be weighed against a benefit item, and the conclusion is that the sum comes out on the right side. Let us welcome that; it is more useful than denying the problem. But the question such an accounting exercise sidesteps is "profitable for whom?" A national average says nothing about distribution: "France" does not receive dividends and does not pay rent.

Second observation: growth is presented here as a good thing in itself, one that supplies the fiscal room. Yet in an economy built on wage labour, growth first measures the mass of value produced, and its engine is the valorisation of capital. Workers produce more than what their wage represents; this unpaid share, surplus value, feeds profit and accumulation. To say that growth serves the climate is to say that this mechanism can finance its own correction. Possible. But the same mechanism has so far produced the emissions that must be reduced, because competition pushes every firm to produce ever more, without regard for what it releases.

Third observation, the most prosaic: the bill. When a transition costs money, who pays? The experience of crises teaches that costs trickle down: restructurings, layoffs, consumption taxes. A climate policy that is "profitable" on average can very well translate into identifiable winners, those who hold the capital of the new sectors, and equally identifiable losers, employees of doomed industries or modest households dependent on their car. A pool of unemployed or precarious workers, available for retraining at low cost, makes the operation even more profitable. This is not fate; it is a choice of economic policy, and the column, in what we know of it, says nothing about it.

To be fair: arguing that inaction costs more than action is progress over many commentaries that speak of "the economy" as a sentient being, sometimes anxious, sometimes reassured. But a cost-benefit calculation is not a plan. Between the demonstration that acting pays and the decision to make the largest emitters pay rather than the most numerous, lies the whole of social struggle. It remains to read the full column to see whether the author ventures there.