Energy renovation: the state cuts five programmes, and modest households will pay

According to Le Monde, the government is ending five programmes that support energy renovation of homes and public buildings. These schemes backed local authorities, landlords and very low-income households. The executive justifies its decision by its wish to redirect funding towards the electrification of energy use. The paper reports that the choice is contested even within the centrist bloc.

What we do not yet know: the breakdown of the budgets, the exact timetable for the closure, and what will concretely replace these programmes for the households concerned. The rest of this piece is our reading, not an established fact.

Let us start in the kitchen, where the bills get settled. A thermal sieve, a leaky home that lets heat escape, is not an abstraction: it is a radiator switched off to keep enough money for the plate, a coat kept on indoors, a child doing homework under a blanket. When renovation aid disappears, the cold does not disappear with it. It stays in the flat.

This is where the notion of social reproduction becomes useful, and not only for academic conferences. Housing, health, care: everything that keeps people fit to live and work. When the public authorities withdraw, that work does not evaporate; it shifts onto households. And in practice, it often lands on women: chasing quotes, juggling the budget, nursing children through bronchiolitis, mopping up damp. These are unpaid hours that nobody counts in the "cost" of the decision.

The case of tenants is crueller still. They bear the heating bill without being able to decide on the works. Yet housing is also an asset: for an owner, it brings in rent; for the person living in it, it must first keep out the cold. Aid to landlords was, after a fashion, a way of reconciling these two logics. Without it, two outcomes take shape: the works are not done and the tenant pays in heating, or they are done and the temptation to pass the cost on to the rent grows. Nothing in what Le Monde reports suggests the state has planned any safeguard. That is a question to put to it.

As for local authorities, renovating a school or a nursery reduces an operating cost. Depriving them of that means imposing austerity through the energy bill: less money for everything else and, in the end, public services that nibble away at the essentials.

Electrifying how we use energy is not a bad goal in itself. But replacing a boiler with a heat pump in a poorly insulated house is like bailing out a bath without plugging the hole. And who can front the investment, if not those who already have savings? The transition, as designed, is an entry fee: wealthier households pay it, the most modest endure it.

The real question, then, is not whether to electrify, but who pays for the transition, and who reaps the benefits. For now, the answer looks like that of every austerity drive: those with no margin to spare.