Heat fund on hold: the state turns off the tap on renewable heat

According to franceinfo, the government has announced the suspension of new funding applications to the fonds chaleur, the public tool that helps deploy renewable heating and cooling networks (réseaux de chaleur et de froid). Amorce, the network of local authorities, denounces a "cataclysm". What we don't know yet: how long the suspension will last, the exact amount of projects waiting, and what will happen to files already submitted. The wire report does not say.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First, the choice of target. A heating network means geothermal energy, biomass, recovered waste heat, distributed to entire neighbourhoods, often to social housing. Nothing spectacular, no ribbon to cut in front of the cameras. Pipes, underground, public. That is precisely what makes it easy to sacrifice when Bercy (the French finance ministry) is looking for savings: nobody has built it a lobby on the scale of the gas industry's.

Next, the mechanics. Mayors and intercommunal bodies have commissioned studies, hired engineering consultancies, sometimes passed council resolutions, all while counting on this support. If the state shuts the counter, the project does not vanish: it lands back on the local authorities' table with a simple alternative. Pay alone, or give up. In the second case, residents stay hooked up to gas and to its prices. The state steps back, and the bill lands locally. This is what we call decentralisation.

One can read in this a fairly clear illustration of what Marxists say about the state: neither a neutral referee nor a runaway machine, but an institution whose room for manoeuvre is bounded by the imperatives of accumulation and budgetary discipline. When markets and creditors need reassuring, the first cuts fall on what pays no immediate dividends. And energy planning, which requires duration and visibility, comes second to the accounting calendar.

There is also what the eco-socialist tradition calls the metabolic rift: a system that always demands more flows of energy and matter, and pushes its costs onto nature and onto those least able to bear them. Here, the domestic version: while fossil fuels stay installed in bills and boilers, the collective alternative is put on pause. Low-income households, often heated at the highest price, pay the bill for a transition they were promised.

We will be told that savings must be made. Fair enough. But a saving that makes gas dependence more expensive tomorrow is not a saving at all: it is a debt rollover, charged to communes and tenants. The real question is not "who can still afford the transition?" but "who decides what gets funded?" For now, the answer fits on one budget line. The heating networks will wait. Winter, for its part, has never allowed itself to be suspended.