• The role of scenarios in public policies
• Scales and actors
• Evolutions in the epistemic status of government scenarios
• From energy forecasting to climate-energy retroforecasting
• Qualifying the sustainability of a scenario
• A hegemonic techno-economic framework
• Economic growth objectives
• World
• European Union
• European States
• Consumption freedom
• World
• European Union
• European states
• Entrepreneurship freedom
• Generalization of markets
• A bunch of useless, dangerous and unequal climate futures
• Bibliography

The role of scenarios in public policies

In this article, I will show that we have good reasons to doubt that most climate change mitigation scenarios project sustainable futures. To understand clearly what that implies for public policies, we first need to understand how scenarios are related to decision-making.

Scales and actors

Many people and organizations produce climate change mitigation scenarios: research institutes, ministries, government agencies, European agencies, international agencies, oil and gas companies, banks, think tanks, associations, lobbies, NGOs, (Labussière and Nadaï 2015) etc. Because these actors have different objectives and mandates, the scales considered also vary.

Some scenarios project a future for the entire world. These are majoritarily designed by a community of nearly 1,500 researchers¹ who work with models representing interactions between the climate system, the global economy and the energy system. These models are called integrated assessment models, or IAMs, and the core of this community is the IPCC. Between 1988 and 2006, the Group 3 of IPCC produced global climate change mitigation scenarios. But since 2006, the IPCC has adopted a "mapmaker" role: its members gather and synthesize the scenarios produced by the IAM community instead of producing their own (Kuhnenn 2018, Beck and Oomen 2021).

Through the IPCC process, the scenarios from the IAM community form the knowledge base for international climate negotiations (Beck and Oomen 2021): they are used by States to define common commitments and mutual policies.

Some international agencies, large energy companies and NGOs also produce such global studies,² but they are less numerous and can rely on other types of models. The scenarios of large companies often support lobbying strategies, and also allow them to anticipate future uncertainties that might affect their business model. They are therefore in a sense more open than those of the IPCC, and make more use of foresight methods.³ In fact, the Shell company has hosted foresight exercises since the 1970s (Andersson 2018).

Other scenarios are developed for countries. When they are made directly within governments, they can support the formulation of public policies. The changes are therefore often formulated in terms of public policies, which is not necessarily the case for all scenarios. For example, the official climate mitigation scenario of the french governement describes a set of public policies (DGEC 2020), while those of ADEME (a national agency) also describe value changes, consumption choices, investments by companies, etc. (ADEME 2021)

These differences can lead to confusions about the epistemological status of the reports. For example, the scenarios Énergie 2010-2020 were produced by the french General Planning Commission between 1996 and 1998. The Economic Analysis Council criticized the report, because most of the determining variables for the future of France did not correspond to public action levers, but to societal trends. One of the scenarios was nevertheless "chosen" by the French government, while the authors wanted to present a plurality of possible futures in which the State was only an actor (Godard 2007).

Finally, scenarios are created for world regions. They can be for example OECD countries, South America, the Global South, the European Union, etc. Because the EU is a law-making body, the scenarios of the European Commission are similar to those of the States. Just like on the national level, many actors try to influence public policies by producing their own scenarios.

Evolutions in the epistemic status of government scenarios

The documents we call today "climate mitigation scenarios" inherit from at least 3 distinct fields of expertise : economic forecasting, global sustainability scenarios, and national energy planning.⁴

Economic forecasting has first been used in governements on short time horizons (1 to 5 years) starting from the 1930s. The goal was to anticipate crises, understand drivers of economic growth, and steer the national economy (Armatte 2007). Some of the macroeconomic models used in those settings have been the foundation for IAMs and energy system models (Matarasso 2007). Practices of energy forecasting existed in governments in the 1960s, but national energy planning really emerged as an expertise in the 1970s, following the first "oil crisis". Energy ministries were founded, and the IEA was created to centralise data on oil reserves (Mitchell 2013). Global sustainability scenarios appeared roughly at the same time, with the publication of the Limits to Growth report in 1972. The idea of a common destiny for the planet became widespread in the 1970s, partly thanks to the joint efforts of futurologists to mitigate the divide between the Eastern bloc and the Western bloc (Andersson 2018). Thus the creation of IIASA in 1972, a pivotal organization in the IAM community, is the result of collaborations between US and Soviet researchers.

These expertises have evolved rapidly in the last 50 years, partly because of "oil crises" and the rise of ecological concerns. At the beginning of the 1970s, most energy forecasts in countries of the Global North projected an exponential growth in energy consumption (Baumgartner and Midttun 1987a). Methods for calculating future energy demand were then limited to extrapolating past trends. These activities were called "forecasting", as the ministries, public companies or government agencies responsible for their implementation considered that their role was to anticipate demand as precisely as possible in order to build a proportionate supply (Hourcade 2017). The growth of energy demand was seen as a natural tendency of human societies, and the management of energy systems was framed solely as a technical problem.

During the 1970s, this tradition was disrupted by concerns about the finiteness of resources linked to the oil crisis, as well as the weak economic growth that accompanied it. At the same time, the emergence of environmental movements questioned the State monopoly on energy forecasting. In East Germany, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, environmental groups gained modelling capabilities and began to offer alternative forecasts, particularly in response to nuclear power plants projects (Baumgartner and Midttun 1986). In France, anti-nuclear researchers designed their own models to challenge EDF’s predictions (Aykut 2019), to little success.

Demand thus began to be increasingly framed as a variable that can be influenced by public policies (Baumgartner and Midttun 1987b), and energy sources were recognized as political choices (Hourcade 2017). As a result, between the 1970s and 1980s, energy demand forecasts for the year 2000 in the countries of the global North decreased significantly (Baumgartner and Midttun 1987b).

This politicization of energy anticipation has also profoundly transformed the epistemic status of anticipation practices, in 3 ways:

• Foresight: some actors conceptualized the future as plural and unpredictable rather than unique and predictable. The scenario method (Roubelat 1993, Becker 1983) was developed and more widely used. For example, Amory Lovins argued that models were incapable of integrating discontinuities and uncertainties. His future demand figures were therefore based in part on narrative descriptions of alternative futures, and were significantly lower than official forecasts (Greenberger and Hogan 1987).
• Backcasting: several actors started to imagine a future deemed desirable, and attempted to reconstruct the steps that could lead to it. This is, for example, what the federal government of Canada tried to do with its National Energy Program published in 1980 (Robinson and Hooker 1987).
• Recognition of the retroactivity of scenarios and models: modellers realized that creating and publishing scenarios modifies the realities they study (Baumgartner and Midttun 1987c, Aykut 2019). The effects of these retroactions can be different depending on national circumstances. In countries with a strong planning tradition, forecasts tend to be performative.⁵ In more liberal countries, forecasts become self-falsifying due to the reaction of companies to the forecast (Baumgartner and Midttun 1987c).

Today, modelers are fully aware of the normativity and retroactivity of scenarios and models. Most of them perceive their studies as a way to make informed decisions rather than predicting the future (Silvast et al. 2020, Labussière and Nadaï 2015).

From energy forecasting to climate-energy retroforecasting

Some of the trends described above can be summarized in the following diagram. It allows to classify energy-climate scenarios according to 2 axes.

• The prescriptive/descriptive axis describes the type of use that is suggested for the scenario.
  • Prescriptive scenarios are used to assess the possible consequences of policies implemented by administrations. They are in some way written "from the point of view" of an administration, and project readers into its possibilities of action. Currently, they are often used to verify that a set of public policies will achieve certain targets of GHG emissions reductions and energy technologies deployment.
  • Descriptive scenarios are used to anticipate possible developments in society in order to better react to them. They do not define policies to be assessed, but policies can be designed in response to the anticipated future.
• The predictable/open future axis describes the epistemology of the future adopted.
  • Forecast scenarios attempt to define the most probable future, possibly including variations linked to uncertainties. The future is framed as knowable.
  • Open scenarios attempt to define plausible but very different futures. The future is framed as fundamentally uncertain.

The intersection of these 2 axes allows to define categories commonly used in futures research. Forecasts refer to the government anticipation practices before the 1970s I described above. Foresight has its own history (Andersson 2018), and only encountered the field of energy and environmental policies in the 1970s. The axes nevertheless allow me to introduce an important distinction that I have not found anywhere else. I have already mentioned the notion of backcasting, but in my opinion it combines 2 approaches which should be distinguished:

• Retroforecasting: designing an ideal future, judged achievable by a set of public policies simulated in a model.
• For retroforesight, the future is more uncertain, and what constitutes a desirable future is ambiguous. This leads to the design of several very different scenarios, to explicit the political choices and the uncertainties involved in achieving these futures.

The climate change mitigation scenarios produced by the IAM community, European authorities and governments are overwhelmingly retroforecasting. They start from energy and climate targets and build patwhays which achieve them, in particular since the Paris Agreement, which enshrined the 1.5°C and 2°C thresholds. As I will show later, scenario variants are based on a set of extremely homogeneous measures, and the economic, social and political organization almost never changes. They demonstrate a lack of "epistemic humility" by not considering alternative solutions to the massive deployment of energy technologies (Floyd et al. 2020).

Conversely, the first sociologists and political scientists who studied energy anticipation recommended implementing methods that could be qualified as retroforesight. Baumgartner and Midttun (1986) proposed the inclusion of people from different social groups so that they could defend their interests and question the basic assumptions of models. Puiseux (1987) recommended the use of simple models which require the explicitation of values and choices, rather than burying them in lines of code.⁶ Had they been followed, these ideas would certainly have led to a strong diversification of scenarios.

Of course, building sustainable futures requires more than foresight methods : one can create a very wide variety of ecologically disastrous and socially unequal futures. In fact, many of these methods have been developed to maintain existing dominations: anticipating and preventing social movements, combating growth-critical narratives, increasing the profits of big companies, etc. (Andersson 2018)

Qualifying the sustainability of a scenario

With that in mind, we can understand what it means to say that a scenario is "unsustainable".

Saying that for a forecast is a bit weird, as this statement is fundamentally incompatible with its use and epistemology. A forecast of energy demand immediately states that demand is non-negotiable, and that political choices only lie in how this demand is met. There is no point in describing a pathway as unsustainable, unless one thinks it is possible to change it. It can of course be shown that this demand depends on hidden hypotheses that serve specific interests, which is equivalent to reclassifying the scenario as retroforecasting.

It is possible to qualify a foresight scenario as unsustainable: the future is framed as plural and unknowable, so there is room for other, more desirable futures. This is also the classic role of scenario analysis (The Shift Project 2019), used in companies to "identify risks and opportunities" and adapt the "business model". The fact that there are unsustainable scenarios is in no way problematic, because these methods aim to anticipate future problems.

Finally, one can also say that scenarios resulting from retroforecasting and retroforesight are unsustainable. These two approaches are meant to show how to get to a future deemed desirable. Here, unsustainability is a problem, since these scenarios are intended to be the basis of laws and policies. This is what I mean when I qualify global, national and European scenarios as unsustainable. In this paper, I use a generous criterion: a scenario that proposes overcoming at least one unsustainable economic institution can be deemed sustainable.

A hegemonic techno-economic framework

For the rest of the paper, I will describe how economic institutions are represented — or not — in climate change mitigation scenarios. What follows is not meant to be a systematic literature review, but I consider it enough to draw general conclusions. I begin with general observations, then I will focus on certain institutions for which research is abundant. For national scenarios, I mainly assess those of EU Member States.

Almost all climate change mitigation scenarios, regardless of scale and actors involved, take for granted all the economic institutions that I identify as unsustainable. In a large systematic review of global sustainability scenarios (243 studies), Lauer et al. (2024) show that only 3.8% of the narratives used in studies depart from the main capitalist economic institutions.⁷ These narratives are used less often in quantified scenarios, therefore they weigh much less in the overall pool of studies.

As explained by Lauer et al. (2024), only scenarios which deviate from the statu quo make economic institutions explicit. In most other cases, they are naturalized. For example, the European Commission published scenarios in early 2024 aimed at defining a climate target for 2040 (European Commission 2024). Targets of more than 95% reduction in GHG emissions compared to 1990 were excluded on the basis of a study by the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change (ESABCC), even though it would be necessary to reach 100% before 2040 to stay under 1.5°C of warming (Spragg-Nilson 2024, Vogel and Hickel 2023, Bourgeois et al. 2023). This study concluded that scenarios above 95% exceed certain levels of technological feasibility and environmental risk (ESABCC and EEA 2023). The ESABCC therefore implicitly refused to consider mitigation levers that are not techno-economic. This is also the case for other bodies providing advice to the Commission. The European Energy and Climate Modeling Forum (ECEMF) is a European research project aiming to bring together and compare different approaches to mitigation scenarios, in order to provide more robust recommendations to the Commission. Their note on the targets for 2040 does not even justify the exclusion of more ambitious trajectories, and is limited to asserting that the "cost-effective" trajectories are located between -84% and -89% in 2040 (Pietzcker et al. 2023).

It is important to emphasize that some institutions are so naturalized that even critical research on climate change mitigation scenarios does not mention them. Apart from Lauer et al. (2024), I found no analysis of the forms of property, labour, trade and entrepreneurship in mitigation scenarios. Of course, for someone who knows well climate change mitigation scenarios, it seems absurd to look for variations in such institutions because they are so naturalized. But it might also mean that many social scientists studying scenarios do not consider challenging these institutions. For this reason, not all the economic institutions mentioned in part 1 will be studied here.

Economic growth objectives

Almost all scenarios include a continuous economic growth. This holds for all scales and all the organizations that produce them. As I will show in the following section, there are however a few scenarios which include reductions in economic output.

World

Since the publication of the Limits to Growth report in 1972, numerous international bodies and research centers have attempted to project sustainable growth scenarios. This gave rise to gigantic scientific undertakings: the IIASA Energy in a Finite World study mobilized 140 scientists for 8 years (Keepin and Wynne 1987). Although the futures represented varied greatly, all concluded that green growth is possible (Cassen and Cointe 2022). The most famous example of this backlash is the DICE model built by economist William Nordhaus. In 1973, he began working on environmental issues. His goal was to allow the exponential growth of US energy consumption to continue indefinitely. He therefore assumed that an infinite source of energy that generates no pollution will be discovered soon – the backstop technology – and will be widespread within 150 years. This allowed him to completely eliminate pollution and the finiteness of resources, and he obviously finds completely different results. Therefore, the question he sought to resolve by building DICE is the optimization of GHG emissions, so as to generate as much economic value as possible (Vieille Blanchard 2007).

As ridiculous as it may seem to non-economists, these assumptions were taken very seriously by the emerging IAM community, and the DICE model formed the basis of multiple models used to build IPCC scenarios (Matarasso 2007). The IPCC describes itself as a neutral body providing a map of possible futures to avoid unsustainable levels of global warming, but Beck and Oomen (2021) show how these futures are in reality extremely restricted.

Among the scenarios gathered in the IPCC AR5 report, 1071 make it possible to calculate changes in GDP. Cointe and Pottier (2023) show that all have annual growth rates of global GDP between +1.11% and +2.88%. Keyßer and Lenzen (2021) show that none of the 222 scenarios from the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C project a decline in economic output. Kuhnhenn (2018) explains that none of the pathways developed by the IAM community since the IPCC adopted its "mapmaker" strategy (2006) include a decrease in GDP. In fact, the IPCC's most "optimistic" socio-economic reference pathway (SSP) forecasts a 13-fold increase in GDP per capita between 2000 and 2100 (Kuhnhenn 2018), which is equivalent to a gain of 26% per decade (Ripple et al. 2024). Palmer (2018) explains that the scenarios analyzed by the IPCC assume a 3- to 8-fold increase in GDP per capita by 2100. Analyzing 25 global scenarios from international agencies, research institutes, NGOs and energy companies, The Shift Project (2019) notes that GDP is also continuously increasing.

These scenarios are made compatible with the thresholds of 1.5°C or 2°C, based on hypotheses of unprecedented technological progress and a strong use of carbon dioxyde removal (Keyßer and Lenzen 2021, Beck and Oomen 2021). These unrealistic and dangerous technological choices, which help to avoid challenging economic growth, became the norm after the Paris Agreement (Kuhnhenn 2018). 70% of the scenarios in the AR6 report database compatible with 1.5°C of global warming use a quantity of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) that exceeds a high risk threshold (Deprez et al. 2024).

Despite all of this, growth objectives are the most commonly challenged institution in global sustainability scenarios. About 9% of the narratives described by Lauer et al. (2024) do not include economic growth. Lauer et al. (2025) find around 30 studies that model post-growth and degrowth scenarios for the world. The number of modelling studies in this field of research is small (75), but has seen an exponential increase between 2000 and 2023.

European Union

In 2023, there were 5 post/degrowth modelling studies that focused on the EU, and none of them have been produced by EU administrations (Lauer et al. 2025). This is not surprising, in view of the Commission's unwavering commitment to economic growth.

The EU Reference Scenario takes the idea of decoupling very seriously. The word appears 11 times in the document, and the planned policies are framed as ways to accelerate it (Directorate-General for Climate Action et al. 2021). The first paragraphs of the section on EU energy demand are solely dedicated to GDP-energy decoupling, and the conclusion also emphasizes this. The mention of GDP is not just an old, outdated habit for the Commission, the impact of measures on output is systematically assessed. For example, in the "Environmental and health impacts" section of the scenarios for 2040 (European Commission 2024), it is the first impact to be evaluated and it is described with more precision than the others.⁸

European States

We're quite lucky in the EU, as most existing de/postgrowth modelling studies focus on the global North. France alone has been the subject of 6 studies since 2000, and Germany 3 (Lauer et al. 2025). A recent example is D'Alessandro et al. (2020), who create a degrowth scenario for France, which includes a job guarantee, working time reductions and a reduction in consumption and export. These studies are a minority compared to the dozens of green growth studies that are published each year.

To get the governemental perspective, I had a look at the National Energy and Climate Plans (NECPs, for the next 10 years) and the Long Term Strategies (LTSs, for 2050) submitted by states to the EU. They are official scenarios, and therefore give a good overview of what kind of future they imagine.

In general, Zell-Ziegler et al. (2021b) explain that no NECPs seeks to apply sufficiency "consistently across all sectors" of the economy, and thus none of the measures they identified in the NECPs question economic growth. A close reading of the NECPs reveals that only 4 plans foresee a slowdown in economic growth following the implementation of mitigation measures, which is accidental. None anticipate a decline in economic output.

There are also 32 occurrences of the concept of decoupling in 14 NECPs, none of which take imports into account. These decouplings are therefore of course insufficient, but demonstrate the persistence of the ideology of green growth. In fact, even a critical assessment of LTSs carried out by the Ecologic Institute (a German research institute financed on public funds by 91%) presupposes that EU GDP will double between 1990 and 2050 (Velten et al. 2022).

Finally, economic growth is often used as the main if not the sole indicator of social well-being in the NECPs and LTSs. Velten et al. (2022) note that the only social well-being indicators used in the LTSs filed by Member States with the European Commission are GDP and employment. Likewise, the instructions for designing the NECPs only require the assessment of "macroeconomic" dimensions (implied: GDP), leaving to countries the initiative of including of other dimensions (General Secretariat of the Council of Europe 2018).

In principle, this does not completely rule out that during the process of designing those plans, some States or State agencies might have explored scenarios with more varied economic outputs. NECPs and LTSs are plans reported to the European Commission, and often contain little detail on the different scenarios that have been produced and debated before the final plan was designed. Considering the above, it is however very unlikely.

Consumption freedom

Consumption freedom is currently a subject of controversy in the economy-energy-climate modeling communities, around sufficiency measures. These aim to reduce the demand for certain goods and services, through changes in the organization of society, lifestyles and technical systems, to reduce environmental pressures (Zell-Ziegler et al. 2021b, Négawatt 2022a). They are therefore in the most literal sense degrowth measures, that is to say which seek to reduce the size of the economy rather than improve its efficiency. According to Lage et al. (2023), one can distinguish policies of:

• Reduction: limit the amount of meat produced and consumed, ban advertising, ban air transport, limit the heating of buildings.
• Substitution: make public transportation free, develop night trains, facilitate access to second-hand goods.

Many of the studies analysed by Lauer et al. (2025) include such policies. They require a precise description of the current state of technical systems and lifestyles, which global models often do not include. For this reason, scenarios and studies on sufficiency often concern the national level.⁹

World

Floyd et al. (2020) note that many studies assert the feasibility of a transition to 100% renewable energies, without proposing a reduction in the demand for energy services. The Shift Project (2019), in their study of 25 global scenarios carried out by NGOs, international agencies and companies, conclude that none projects "behavioural changes"¹⁰ to reduce demand. This is also the observation of Kuhnhenn (2018) regarding scenarios designed using IAMs.

Négawatt (2022b) nevertheless notes that sufficiency is present under other names in a few rare global scenarios. This is the case of the report Net Zero Emissions by 2050: A Roadmap for the Global Energy Sector from the International Energy Agency (2021). Lauer et al. (2024) find a few studies which explicitly challenge the growth tendency of capitalism, and thus implicitly assume sufficiency changes.

European Union

On the policy side, the European Commission's most recent multi-sector scenarios does not include any sufficiency measure in its 3 main scenarios (European Commission 2024). It nevertheless creates an optional variant of these 3 scenarios, which integrates some sufficiency measures: reduction in the average temperature in buildings, active and shared mobility, reduction in plane travels, change in food diet. Négawatt (2022b) lists 2 European scenarios from NGOs which have integrated sufficiency measures: the Net Zero 2050 scenario by Climact and the PAC scenario by CAN-EU and the EEB. Finally, Négawatt joined forces with 21 other organizations to produce CLEVER, a European scenario based on sufficiency (Bourgeois et al. 2023).

In these scenarios, however, it is not always clear how changes in demand will be achieved. Do the authors consider that they will take place due to cultural evolution, investments and dismantling of infrastructures, regulation and distribution of income?

Previous research has shown that economics and behavioural sciences are overrepresented among social scientists in EU-funded energy research projects (Genus et al. 2021), while SSH account for only 10% of funding (Royston and Foulds 2021). This suggests that in the few projects where it is studied, demand reduction is framed as a matter of individual responsibility.

European states

As I mentioned above, controversies on the reduction of demand have been going on for longer at the national level. From the 1970s, all possibilities for reducing demand were grouped under the expression "energy conservation" (de Man 1987), which brought together improvements in the efficiency of appliances and sufficiency. Amory Lovins' studies for Canada and the United States did much to disseminate these ideas, although they were primarily focused on energy efficiency (Greenberger and Hogan 1987). In France, however, EDF has managed to maintain a monopoly on energy expertise, and to impose its strong growth scenarios (Puiseux 1987, Aykut 2019).

Zell-Ziegler et al. (2021b) list all sufficiency measures in the NECPs. They adopt a generous categorization, considering for example that a carbon tax is a structural incentive to reduce the use of energy services, and therefore a sufficiency measure. But even then, they find that most countries only included between 5 and 10 sufficiency measures. According to Lage et al. (2023), these only represent 8% of the measures contained in the NECPs. They compare these results with the measures proposed by 11 citizen climate assemblies in Europe. They find that the assemblies offer on average 5 times more sufficiency measures than NECPs.¹¹

Zell-Ziegler et al. (2021b) also show that most of the sufficiency measures in the NECPs do not reduce the use of an energy service. Most often, they aim to substitute one use for another. This is particularly the case for the transport sector, which mainly includes investments in cycling infrastructure or public transport, that do not guarantee the reduction of other uses.

The 2 studies conclude that sufficiency is very little supported by concrete measures in the NECPs. This can partly be explained by the fact that in the template provided by the European Commission there is no section dedicated to sufficiency, and the content requested in the sections refers to technical changes and markets (General Secretariat of the Council of Europe 2018). The word "sufficiency" does not appear anywhere in the template. Member States are therefore discouraged to project sufficiency policies.

In LTSs, the main emissions reduction levers identified by Velten et al. (2022) are electrification, synthetic fuels, green hydrogen, energy efficiency, BECCS, as well as some (unquantified) behavioural changes. In other words, LTSs offers very few sufficiency measures. In the case of agriculture, only 8 countries mention changing diet as a lever for reducing GHG emissions, and 2 countries (France and Italy) mention reducing production (Velten et al. 2022). Zell-Ziegler et al. (2021a) study transportation sufficiency measures in LTSs and NECPs. They find that only 17% of them aim to reduce the number of km traveled, the rest aiming to change modes of transport. They also note that no measures have been announced to reduce the amount of freight transport.

Apart from NECPs and LTSs, there is a diversity of competing scenarios in national spaces. Stephenson and Allwood (2023) study 15 recently designed scenarios for the UK, and find that the government's scenarios do not even include behavioural sufficiency. Most of the scenarios studied use large quantities of zero-carbon fuels and carbon capture and storage, two technologies that are not developed on an industrial scale and are unlikely to be in the decades to come. However, the UK FIRES and Centre for Research into Energy Demand Solutions have created scenarios based on a reduction in energy demand of approximately 50%, based on sufficiency measures.

France is one of the European countries where the theme of sufficiency has become most prominent in public debate. Aykut and Nadaï (2019) report that from 2012, the result of the National Debate on the Energy Transition included 2 trajectories with a 50% reduction in energy demand for 2050, in particular thanks to the work of the Négawatt association. They have designed their own scenario, which is based on numerous sufficiency measures (Négawatt 2022a), and manages, for example, to limit the increase in demand for lithium to 52% while the IEA forecasts a global increase of 4200 % between 2020 and 2040 (International Energy Agency 2022). In 2021, RTE's 2050 Energy Futures report includes one scenario (out of 16) integrating numerous sufficiency measures, allowing to further reduce energy demand by 15% (Veyrenc and Houvenagel 2021). The ADEME Transition 2050 report includes two scenarios with sufficiency changes (ADEME 2021). However, it frames sufficiency essentially as an issue of individual choice, and seems to incorporate few measures to mitigate the inequalities linked to this cultural change. These recent developments do not really translate to national plans. Indeed, in the National Low-Carbon Strategy, which is the basis of the NECP and LTS, sufficiency is framed only as a voluntary lifestyle change, when it is not confused with efficiency and recycling (Directorate General for Energy and Climate 2020).

Entrepreneurship freedom

The sufficiency policies mentioned above and the phase-out of fossil fuels would certainly have important consequences on the supply side, leading to business closures and infrastructure dismantling. Still, I did not find any scenario that explored in detail the policies necessary to manage that transition.

Several studies on global scenarios converge to affirm that the benefits of fossil and nuclear energies as well as carbon capture and storage (CCS) are systematically overestimated. Minx et al. (2024) compare 1500 scenarios compatible with 2°C of global warming, generated by 30 models. They show that most reference scenarios have a much higher dependence on coal than has been observed in the last 60 years. These scenarios include very optimistic assumptions about the costs and pace of deployment of CCS, and pessimistic assumptions about the costs and deployability of renewable technologies. They overestimate the technical difficulty and costs of abandoning coal. Analyzing 409 global scenarios, Weibezahn et al. (2022) find that those of the IEA, the IPCC and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) largely underestimate the costs of nuclear power, and overestimate those of renewable energies. Carrington and Stephenson (2018) study 26 scenarios from fossil fuel companies, the IEA, the World Energy Council (WEC) and environmental associations. They show that the growth rates for solar photovoltaic energy in all scenarios are between 11 and 14%, while the historical long-term growth rate is 34%.

Global scenarios therefore tend to overestimate the value of the most dangerous technologies, which should be dismantled as soon as possible. Therefore, those producing them implicitly defend the entrepreneurship freedom of the most polluting industries. But even if we were to accept those studies as scientifically sound, dismantling is to my knowledge an absent topic in climate mitigation scenarios. For example, the International Energy Agency's net zero emissions scenario includes targets for stopping the use of fossil fuels (International Energy Agency 2023), but constantly euphemizes what this implies. The authors only recommend a halt to investment, without specifying how, when and by whom those infrastructures would be closed. This is because modellers assume that infrastructures will and should be used until their estimated end of life.¹² This is for example explicit in Transport and Environment's analyses on freight decarbonization (Molliere 2022). Their model simulate the future emissions of thermal trucks, based on how quick they can be replaced by electric trucks after their end of life.

Some scenarios can however implicitly project a reduction in entrepreneurship freedom through choices in how a resource will be used. The french scenarios from ADEME, which I already mentioned, are strongly differentiated based on the use of land and biomass. S1 foresees that more and more land would be left unexploited, which would increase the french carbon sink, whereas S4 relies on the industrialization of forests and industrial carbon storage to boost economic growth (ADEME 2021). S1 is therefore a future where the exploitability of biomass and land by capitalists is greatly reduced.

Generalization of markets

It is extremely rare that climate mitigation scenarios challenge the generalization of markets in the economy. Even in degrowth and post-growth scenarios, there is a strong bias towards the conservation of the main capitalist institutions (Lauer et al. 2024, Lauer et al. 2025). Many scenarios do however constrain markets through regulations, but that does not marginalize market echange.

Anderson and Jewell (2019) explain that global scenarios carried out with IAMs presuppose the conservation of a market economy. They also make strong use of carbon taxes and carbon markets, which increases the importance of this institution.

As for European states, NECP sufficiency measures are more often fiscal (29%) and economic (19%) than regulatory (11%) (Lage et al. 2023). This means that the majority of these are economic incentives or penalties, which do not guarantee a reduction in the amount of energy consumed. Zell-Ziegler et al. (2021a) also find that regulation is underused in transport measures in LTS. The sufficiency scenarios that I mentioned for France (ADEME 2021, Bourgeois et al. 2023) give an important place to regulation, without challenging the hegemony of the markets.

A bunch of useless, dangerous and unequal climate futures

In conclusion, the overwhelming majority of climate mitigation scenarios on all scales do not challenge the current economic institutions. Most scenarios do not even mention them, which makes critical reviews difficult. Some economic institutions are so deeply naturalized that even critical researchers ignore them. Simply put, changing the way our economy works seems to be considered irrelevant for climate change mitigation and sustainability in general.

On the global scale, a small but continuously increasing number of scenarios project alternative ways to organize the economy. Most of these scenarios use the labels of "post-growth" and "degrowth", and focus mostly on highly aggregated reductions of economic output, sometimes with strong social security measures. A lot of these new scenarios are designed in and for european countries, and most of them are made by researchers.

On the EU and national scale, the number of scenarios challenging the statu quo is also growing, often under the label of "sufficiency". They mostly focus on reducing production and consumption for specific sectors and activities, but more rarely include policies to reduce inequalities. Many of these studies are designed in and for France, Germany and the EU, by researchers and NGOs.

However, challenging economic growth and consumption freedom is unlikely to be enough for sustainability. As I have explained in part 1, economic growth is generated by structural imperatives linked to private property, market competition, free trade, etc. Moreover, under capitalism, well-being is approximately coupled to the continuation of economic growth. Therefore some scenarios lack strong redistributive measures (which affect other economic institutions), which would ensure that the reduction in production does not harm the most deprived.

These results are extremely worrying for the future of human societies. Global scenarios that inform international climate governance prepare the ground for the brutal deployment of dangerous technologies that will not be enough to stem climate disasters, while States and the EU seem to have completely given up on remaining under 2°C of global warming. Very few scenarios can teach us how to reduce inequalities between countries and within countries, which will worsen due to unequal exposure and capacity to adapt to ecological risks.

It is important to understand that contesting these assertions based on model results is not obvious. Many models do indeed foresee that the world can stay under 1.5°C of warming under capitalism, but many of the empirical phenomenon that I described in Part 1 are not easy to model.¹³ As Floyd et al. (2020) point out, a model run does not prove that the future it describes is possible. Models are constructed according to theories and hypotheses, which represent certain areas of reality in certain ways and ignore others. Their validity is tested with historical datasets, but divergences between empirical research and model results are common (see for example Trutnevyte 2016). In these cases, one should call into question the reliability of models.

Making this observation is different from denouncing the inadequacy of current policies and the slowness of international negotiations. Rather, I assert that the knowledge base with which decisions about the future of human societies are made is useless, dangerous and unequal. Even if a government wanted to build a truly sustainable society, it would come up against decades of expertise focused solely on fostering growth and capitalism.

How is it that, in 50 years of global "awareness", obviously unsustainable futures have been designed year after year? Why have thousands of researchers, engineers and economists accepted and perpetuated this, despite their undeniable competence?

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