Energy renovation: the state cuts back, and low-income households will pay the bill

According to franceinfo, the government has decided to scrap several energy renovation programmes. The executive wants to "refocus" the energy saving certificates (certificats d'économies d'énergie, a scheme that obliges energy suppliers to fund efficiency measures) on electrification. Players in the sector are angry: one of them, the Action des collectivités territoriales pour l'efficacité énergétique programme (a local-authority energy efficiency scheme), calls it an "incomprehensible decision". A franceinfo headline, quoting a sector insider, puts it bluntly: "It's abandoning the most vulnerable households".

What we don't know yet: the exact list of programmes affected, the sums involved, the timetable. The report doesn't give them, and we won't invent them. What remains is the underlying question, which needs no figures to be asked.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact. A thermal sieve (passoire thermique, the French term for a badly insulated home) is not a climate abstraction. It is a kitchen where you keep your coat on, a child's bedroom you no longer heat, a bill paid late and with anxiety. When the state withdraws help with insulation, the cold doesn't disappear: it stays in the house. And someone looks after it.

This is where the concept of social reproduction becomes useful, and it is anything but arcane. Capitalism depends on work that produces people rather than goods: caring, feeding, raising children, looking after the elderly. This work is often unpaid or badly paid, and it is mostly women who do it. When cuts hit health, housing or care, to borrow the logic of the Gazette's conceptual notes, this work is not eliminated: it is passed on to households. A poorly insulated home is exactly that. It means children who are sick more often, extra home care, hours of improvising to make the wood, the blanket and the budget last. The heating bill is added to the double shift.

We are told the answer is to "refocus" on electrification. Why not: changing how we heat is useful. But a heat pump in a house that leaks from every side is like filling a bath with no plug. And who has the capital to front the costs of a transition that is supposedly collective? Not the supermarket cashier or the care worker who rents a flat whose works they don't decide.

The ecological transition is thus presented as a shared effort, when the bill is distributed according to income. The richest renovate at their own expense or claim tax relief; the most modest wait for a help that keeps receding. Local authorities and building professionals, for their part, watch worksites disappear, and with them local jobs.

The government must say clearly what it will put in place for low-income households, and by when. Until it does, "refocus" sounds a lot like a polite word for "saving" on those who are already cold.