Gas, heating oil: winter is coming, and it's still the same people who'll be cold

According to Le Figaro, the prices of gas and heating oil have kept climbing in recent months, and winter bills promise to be painful. A study by the Médiateur national de l'énergie (the national energy ombudsman), cited by the daily, finds that 86% of French people feel their energy costs weigh heavily on their budget. The Figaro headline picks up a witness's line: "We'll have to skip heating every day."

That's the reported news. What the dispatch doesn't detail: who sets these prices, who profits from them, which households are hit hardest. We don't have those figures, and we won't invent them. The rest is our reading.

The witness's sentence has become commonplace. Choosing between eating and heating is called "managing your budget." It even becomes advice: turn the thermostat down a degree, put on a jumper. The injunction lands on the tenant of a energy-sieve flat, not on the person who never looks at the thermostat. Emissions have owners, but sobriety has a postcode and an income.

The mechanism is older than today's crisis. Eco-Marxists speak of a "metabolic rift": a capitalism that demands ever more energy and materials offloads its costs onto ecosystems and the poorest populations, those who contributed least to emissions (concept note from the Gazette). Here the cost takes the form of a cold radiator. Gas and heating oil are traded commodities. Their price follows supply, speculation and geopolitics, rarely the need of a family to stay warm.

We are told the transition is expensive. That's true, and the question is: who gets the bill? As long as insulation, heat pumps and district heating remain a matter of individual credit and subsidy applications, the modest household pays twice: fossil fuel expensive today, renovation out of reach tomorrow. Meanwhile, the energy companies don't face a choice between heating and eating.

The alternative exists on paper: public planning of renovation, protected social tariffs, energy treated as a service rather than an asset. Marx spoke of "rationally governing" the metabolism between humans and nature, by associated producers. Translated for November: collectively deciding what we produce, what we heat, and who gets first claim.

Carbon markets and one-off cheques, by contrast, treat the symptom and leave the disease. Their great advantage is that they change nothing about ownership or rent.

The winter will be harsh, we're told. It will be harshest for those whose boiler depends on the price of gas. The question is whether public debate will talk about pump prices or profits at the source. The bets are open, but the radiators stay cold.