Pour une convergence des transitions écologique et numérique

This entry is not a report, and that is the whole point of it.

Over ten years, the CNNum (Conseil national du numérique) published reasoned opinions and reports. Here, with IDDRI and Place to B, it launched a 19-page call for commitments, five days before the opening of COP21. This is the weakest instrument in the toolbox: a call binds no one, recommends nothing specific, and its effectiveness can only be measured by how many signatories go on to do what they announced.

It is also the only output from that period where the Council partnered with a citizen-mobilisation space rather than with institutions. That choice said something about the moment: at the end of 2015, the convergence of the two transitions had no public-policy translation yet, and the call served as a way of putting it on the agenda.

What came afterwards is instructive by comparison. In July 2020, the CNNum submitted a 50-measure roadmap on the environment and digital technology to the Minister for the Ecological Transition and the Secretary of State for Digital Affairs. A real instrument, with quantified recommendations, and I had no part in it, having left the Council two years earlier. Five years separate the call from the roadmap, and it took until a 2021 law for actual obligations to exist.

The gap between the two deserves to be named for what it is: not an error of scale, as elsewhere in this library, but an error of instrument. We had the right subject, three years before it became a matter of public policy, and we carried it through the means that committed us the least.

One last point connects this entry to the Villani report. Its fifth strand took up the same ambition: a leaner AI and an AI in the service of ecology. Ten years after the 2015 call, data-centre energy consumption has grown faster than digital technology’s environmental applications. The two terms of the convergence were not symmetrical, and we failed to see it either in 2015 or in 2018.