Heat fund: the state turns off the transition tap in the name of the budget

According to Le Monde, the government is suspending new applications for aid from the heat fund (fonds chaleur, the state subsidy scheme for renewable heat projects). The office of the ministry for ecological transition justifies the decision by the "significant number of projects filed in 2026" and by "budgetary constraints", linked to the cut in Ademe's allocation (the French environment and energy agency) in the 2027 budget. What the dispatch does not say: how many projects are affected, for what amounts, and for how long the suspension will last. We will not invent it.

So let us stick to what is established, and to what we make of it.

The justification is delicious. There are too many renewable heat projects, so we stop helping them. When a public policy is a victim of its own success, one might imagine it being funded more. Here, it is put on pause. The counter was too popular; it is the counter that closes, not the demand that falls.

This is no accounting detail. Heat weighs heavily in energy consumption, and getting it off fossil fuels requires public money, duration and visibility. An industrialist, a local authority or a landlord who files a district heating or biomass project makes plans over years. An aid that is cut according to the annual budget sends a clear signal: fossil fuels, for their part, do not need to ask permission.

Our reading: the state is not a neutral referee, but a caretaker of the current affairs of an economic order that must keep on accumulating. When it has to choose between balancing the books and undoing dependence on fossil fuels, budgetary constraint goes first. It is not a law of nature. It is a choice about distribution: who pays taxes, who is exempt, which spending is deemed untouchable. The "constraints" invoked do not fall from the sky.

Marxists speak of a metabolic rift between society and nature: an economy that demands ever more energy and matter dumps the costs onto ecosystems and onto the poorest, who emitted the least. The suspension fits this logic. Slowing decarbonisation prolongs the climate bill, which others will settle: modest households exposed to gas prices, regions absorbing heatwaves and droughts.

We will be told that one must be reasonable. We reply with a question: reasonable for whom? Fossil fuel subsidies and aid to large companies stand up better to austerity drives than the tools of transition do. Without clarification from the government, we cannot say what will be sacrificed next. We can say what already has been: planning. A transition is not steered at the counter, intermittently, according to the mood of Bercy (the finance ministry, in Paris). It requires a plan, guaranteed resources, and a clear decision on who pays. For now, it is the plan that has been suspended.