Failure to decouple economic growth from natural resources consumption leads to considering post-growth politics not only as a matter of doing with less economic resources but also as a matter of doing with declining natural resources. Among these, energy is a major issue.
While French political debate on energy has polarised these last years around the issue of a carbon tax, another proposition has been discussed in British politics that implies another frame of analysis: a “carbon card”, with individual carbon quotas, some form of energy rationing actually (Fawcett et Parag, 2010).
Considered by DEFRA (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) between 2006 and 2008, this public policy proposition breaks new ground in terms of environmental policy, being fundamentally based on acknowledging and institutionalising environmental limits (climate and energy) as a constraining frame for political and social affairs. The implementation this policy would actually institutionalise energy degrowth, setting energy depletion as a frame within which society should fit.
The reference to environmental limits is at the core of green politics (Dobson, 2007), but environmental public policies have generally focused on trying to set up a legal frame to organise negotiations and solve conflicts, rather than focusing on conserving nature of repairing environmental damages (Lascoumes, 1994). On the contrary, the carbon card allows to think a shift from negotiated self-limitation to non-negotiable self-limitation, where material environmental limits shrink the range of political action.
The analysis of the carbon card scheme will be an opportunity to study how the loss of autonomy from the political sphere happens when faced with the radical heteronomy of environmental limits. It will give some new insights on what post-energy-growth politics could be like in a finite world and, what is more, in an overshoot situation (Catton, 1982).
