We need new narratives and new language to face the climate crisis. When we need a new word, often it can make sense to borrow one from someone else.
How do we create a word to help us get across a concept, explain our actions and rationale, and create something to rally around?
So what is the concept we want to communicate?
That’s it, at the highest level, but there is more to it than that…
In addition to a decrease of energy consumption, it influences uses and pushes for a change in behaviour, both on an individual and collective level. It aims to reduce demand, and therefore reduce the strain on renewable sources.
The words “deliberate and structured” are critical here: this is not a recession, financial crash or poverty – it is a joyful and experimental, democratic reduction in energy consumption.
Ultimately, this concept needs to be communicated, so we need to find language for it.
There are three main ways to talk about this that we have come across Sobriety, Sufficiency, and Frugality.
What’s your immediate reaction to each of those?
These can be used to communicate the desired idea, but let’s look at the most common understandings and definitions of the words, because learning new language isn’t going to be comfortable.
We are currently in a world that is drunk on fossil energy abundance. Would a little sobriety be what we are after as we curb this addiction?
“La Sobrieté Energetique” [FR] is the word that is most commonly used by the French thought-leaders on this subject. So a direct translation would be energy sobriety.
While this term will raise eyebrows, when grasped it has the power of metaphor behind it – no one wants to be the drunk!
Sufficiency is the most widely in English literature so far.
The French association called négaWatt has a Sufficiency Manifesto, and it is a term used by the IPCC.
The meaning of “sufficiency” works well, as it nicely links with meeting the essential needs of everyone, but it isn’t as emotive nor forms a clarion call like “sobriety” in our view.
The emotional significance for frugality has likely shifted over the past century as we in the Global North have moved to high-consumptive lifestyles, driven by the push of marketing and enabled by abundant fossil energy, globalisation and neo-colonialism.
Although being “frugal” could be seen as a complement for a savvy person, it may also have a negative connotation as being “cheap”.
For many people, use of frugality would need to be paired with some education to show how the shifts suggested are about opening up more choice, well-being and freedom, rather than constricting it.
Frugality may have the easiest journey in becoming a word to signify the experimentation and joy of this concept. Thrifting is a beloved passion for many!
Using words in new ways can be confusing, but language is constantly evolving, and we are creatures that understand metaphor better than anything else.
In the urgency of the current polycrisis we face, we don’t have time to explain concepts in long-form every time, nor to wait for language to shift to represent new concepts. So we need new meanings for words to illustrate the concepts we mean. We need to be the uncomfortable innovators who start to use new language.
If you are curious about learning more about what is energy sobrieté, and what it is not: listen to the experts Jean-Marc Jancovici and Nate Hagens discussing it on The Great Simplification.
It’s an associative French think-tank carrying out independent, forward-looking analysis to show that an energy transition is not only achievable in the technical sense, but also desirable for society. For more than 20 years, enhanced modelling of France’s energy, GHG and raw material footprint has fed their scenario building and advocacy work towards strong sustainability.
négaWatt produce one of the few energy scenarios that explicitly includes energy sufficiency. Have a look at the négaWatt scenario, which estimates that it can slash the demand for energy by 28% by 2050, out of a total reduction of 50%, where the other 22% is achieved through energy efficiency. (French study)
négaWatt also produced an illustrated guide on energy sufficiency, towards a more sustainable and fair society. They also produced an illustrated version of the 2017 négawatt Scenario, plus an executive summary.
