The Shift Project (also called ''The Shift'' or TSP) is a French
nonprofit
A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...
created in 2010 that aims to limit both climate change and the dependency of our economy on
fossil fuels
A fossil fuel is a hydrocarbon-containing material formed naturally in the Earth's crust from the remains of dead plants and animals that is extracted and burned as a fuel. The main fossil fuels are coal, oil, and natural gas. Fossil fuels ma ...
.
Presentation, goals and organization
The Shift Project is a French
nonprofit
A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...
think tank
A think tank, or policy institute, is a research institute that performs research and advocacy concerning topics such as social policy, political strategy, economics, military, technology, and culture. Most think tanks are non-governmental o ...
that shares ideas with economic, political, academic and voluntary actors.
The Shift Project is funded by corporate sponsors. Its budget for 2017 was about 600,000 euros.
The organization is led by a group of three people elected by the board of directors, which includes members of the sponsoring companies. A group of experts, called the "Expert Committee" (), ensures the scientific validity of the work done by The Shift Project. This group of experts (in economics, finance, climate, physics, history...) includes Alain Grandjean, Gaël Giraud, Hervé Le Treut,
Jean-Pascal van Ypersele
Jean-Pascal van Ypersele de Strihou (born 1957) is a Belgian academic climatologist. He is a professor of Environmental Sciences at the UCLouvain (Belgium). As a previous vice-chair of the IPCC, ''Van Yp'' (as he is called by his peers) is one ...
and Jacques Treiner. When the think tank was created, the first director was Cédric Ringenbach. He held this position until 2016, when he left The Shift Project and created the
nonprofit organization
A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...
The Climate Collage
''The Climate Fresk'' is a French nonprofit organization founded in December 2018 whose aim is to raise public awareness about climate change. It proposes a collaborative serious game based on 42 cards where the participants draw a Fresk which s ...
, which was later renamed to The Climate Fresk. Now headed by Matthieu Auzanneau, The Shift has a team of about ten employees and works with volunteers who are grouped into an independent nonprofit called ''The Shifters''.
The Shift examines the dependency of our economy on oil through three angles: the potential return of economic growth, the issues related to the finite amount of
oil
An oil is any nonpolar chemical substance that is composed primarily of hydrocarbons and is hydrophobic (does not mix with water) & lipophilic (mixes with other oils). Oils are usually flammable and surface active. Most oils are unsaturated ...
and, of course, the climate change due to carbon emissions. According to The Shift, although the GDP may have use cases, it is not really useful, especially because it does not consider natural resources (so it does not account for their limited availability) or resulting externalities like
greenhouse gas emissions
Greenhouse gas emissions from human activities strengthen the greenhouse effect, contributing to climate change. Most is carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels: coal, oil, and natural gas. The largest emitters include coal in China and lar ...
.
Projects, events and activities
Since 2012, The Shift Project has organized an annual two-day meeting called The Shift Forum with the objective of running a debate between big industrial and financial company leaders and experts on climate, energy and economics. The Shift also organizes many public events, sometimes in collaboration with other organizations like the Business and Climate Summit 2015 or the World Efficiency 2015.
The nonprofit also contributed to the National Debate for Energy Transition in France and its president, Jean-Marc Jancovici, is a member of the French Committee on Climate Change.
Main publications
The Shift mostly works in task forces: for a couple of months or years, a group of experts (from higher education and academic research, NGOs, public sector, companies...) is set up on a well-defined question. When the project ends, the task force writes a report and presents it to concerned actors. The report is then made publicly available.
Addressed issues include the building rehabilitation to make them more energy-efficient, the relation between energy and GDP, alternative metrics to GDP, the scientific rigor of energy scenarios, sustainable mobility or the price of carbon.
For the price of carbon in Europe, the Shift suggests to set a
reservation price
In economics, a reservation (or reserve) price is a limit on the price of a good or a service. On the demand side, it is the highest price that a buyer is willing to pay; on the supply side, it is the lowest price a seller is willing to accept ...
to 20
euro
The euro ( symbol: €; code: EUR) is the official currency of 19 out of the member states of the European Union (EU). This group of states is known as the eurozone or, officially, the euro area, and includes about 340 million citizens ...
s and increase it every year.
Since 2013, The Shift has been gathering experts on the energy rehabilitation of buildings and made propositions like the Energy Efficiency Passport. In addition to being experimented by the Shift through the nonprofit organization ''Expérience P2E'', this building passport was then included in the Energy Transition Law and is now used by various actors in the building industry.
In 2016, at The Shift Project request, the engineer
Francisco Luciano
Francisco is the Spanish and Portuguese form of the masculine given name ''Franciscus''.
Nicknames
In Spanish, people with the name Francisco are sometimes nicknamed " Paco". San Francisco de Asís was known as ''Pater Comunitatis'' (father of ...
gathered a team of experts including the
SNCF
The Société nationale des chemins de fer français (; abbreviated as SNCF ; French for "National society of French railroads") is France's national state-owned railway company. Founded in 1938, it operates the country's national rail traffi ...
,
Vinci Autoroutes
Vinci may refer to:
Places
* Vinci, Tuscany, a ''comune'' in the Province of Florence, Italy
* Vinci (Golubac), a community in Braničevo District, Serbia
People
* Alessandro Vinci (born 1987), Italian footballer
* Alessio Vinci (born 1968), It ...
car sharing
Carsharing or car sharing (AU, NZ, CA, TH, & US) or car clubs (UK) is a model of car rental where people rent cars for short periods of time, often by the hour. It differs from traditional car rental in that the owners of the cars are often pri ...
, the senior official Olivier Paul-Dubois-Taine and researchers. In September 2017, The Shift published the report "''Decarbonize mid-density areas – Less carbon more bond''", for which The Shift and the project leader Francisco Luciano were invited by the Ministry for Transportation to attend the Mobility Foundations and various governmental working groups. The report, which is aimed to be well-argued and quantitative, concludes that it is possible to strongly decarbonize mobility in suburban areas thanks to
cycling
Cycling, also, when on a two-wheeled bicycle, called bicycling or biking, is the use of cycles for transport, recreation, exercise or sport. People engaged in cycling are referred to as "cyclists", "bicyclists", or "bikers". Apart from two ...
,
car sharing
Carsharing or car sharing (AU, NZ, CA, TH, & US) or car clubs (UK) is a model of car rental where people rent cars for short periods of time, often by the hour. It differs from traditional car rental in that the owners of the cars are often pri ...
and fast public transports. The working group also studied the delivery of goods and
remote work
Remote work, also called work from home (WFH), work from anywhere, telework, remote job, mobile work, and distance work is an employment arrangement in which employees do not commute to a central place of work, such as an office building, war ...
.
On 4 October 2018, the think tank published a report on the
digital economy
The digital economy is a portmanteau of digital computing and economy, and is an umbrella term that describes how traditional brick-and-mortar economic activities (production, distribution, trade) are being transformed by Internet, World Wide Web, ...
impact on climate and environment. The report notes that the worldwide energy consumption of the digital economy grows at a very fast rate (about 9% a year) with a worsening energy efficiency, unlike most economic sectors. It concludes by advocating digital sobriety to minimize most of this impact growth.
Pledge for climate: The 2017 Decarbonize Europe Manifesto
The call for action of the economic actors
On 21 March 2017, the think tank made public the signatories of a text called "Decarbonize Europe Manifesto". This text is described as a wake-up call 15 months after the
Paris Agreement
The Paris Agreement (french: Accord de Paris), often referred to as the Paris Accords or the Paris Climate Accords, is an international treaty on climate change. Adopted in 2015, the agreement covers climate change mitigation, adaptation, and ...
. It begins with: "We, the signatories of this Manifesto to decarbonize Europe, call upon all European States to immediately implement policies aiming to achieve a level of greenhouse gas emissions close to zero by 2050!" and aims to "''guarantee peace''". It ends with: "We call upon all European actors – individuals, businesses and public authorities – to implement concrete and coherent strategies which can meet the challenge posed by climate change and the limits of natural resources.http://decarbonizeurope.org/en/" The Shift project claims the decarbonization of Europe is a challenge, but it is necessary for a modern future.
It is supported by more than 3,000 citizens including 80 company directors and around forty scientists and political figures. The press mainly mentions the signature of economic leaders like the magazine ''Challenges'': "Climate: Why the company directors (at last) unite to decarbonize Europe".
The think tank then called candidates running for president for a commitment in favor of a European plan to fight climate change that would abide by the Paris Agreement
Martin Bouygues
Martin Pierre Marie Bouygues (; born 3 May 1952) is the chairman and chief executive officer of the French company Bouygues which employs around 130,000 people globally. It was founded by his father Francis Bouygues in 1952.
In 2015, he was ran ...
(
Bouygues
Bouygues S.A. () is a French industrial group headquartered in the 8th arrondissement of Paris, France. Bouygues is listed on the Euronext Paris exchange and is a blue chip in the CAC 40 stock market index. The company was founded in 1952 by F ...
Guillaume Pepy
Guillaume Pepy (born 26 May 1958) is a high-ranking French civil servant who currently serves as president of the SNCF, the French national rail authority. He is also Chairman of Eurostar and Deputy-Chairman of the Keolis Group.
President Nicol ...
(
SNCF
The Société nationale des chemins de fer français (; abbreviated as SNCF ; French for "National society of French railroads") is France's national state-owned railway company. Founded in 1938, it operates the country's national rail traffi ...
Orange
Orange most often refers to:
*Orange (fruit), the fruit of the tree species '' Citrus'' × ''sinensis''
** Orange blossom, its fragrant flower
*Orange (colour), from the color of an orange, occurs between red and yellow in the visible spectrum
* ...
Crédit mutuel
Crédit Mutuel is a French cooperative banking group, one of the country's top five banks with over 30 million customers. It traces its origins back to the German cooperative movement inspired by Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen in Alsace–Lorrain ...
Jean-Dominique Senard
Jean-Dominique Senard (born 7 March 1953) is a French industrialist in the automobile industry. On 11 May 2012, he succeeded Michel Rollier as chief executive officer of the Michelin tire company after joining the company as chief financial offic ...
(
Michelin
Michelin (; ; full name: ) is a French multinational tyre manufacturing company based in Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes ''région'' of France. It is the second largest tyre manufacturer in the world behind Bridgestone and lar ...
Thalys
Thalys (French: ) is a French-Belgian high-speed train operator originally built around the LGV Nord high-speed line between Paris and Brussels. This track is shared with Eurostar trains that go from Paris, Brussels or Amsterdam to London via ...
Jean-Pascal van Ypersele
Jean-Pascal van Ypersele de Strihou (born 1957) is a Belgian academic climatologist. He is a professor of Environmental Sciences at the UCLouvain (Belgium). As a previous vice-chair of the IPCC, ''Van Yp'' (as he is called by his peers) is one ...
; the biologist and senior official Dominique Dron; the mathematician
Ivar Ekeland
Ivar I. Ekeland (born 2 July 1944, Paris) is a French mathematician of Norwegian descent. Ekeland has written influential monographs and textbooks on nonlinear functional analysis, the calculus of variations, and mathematical economics, as well a ...
Roger Balian
Roger Balian (born 18 January 1933) is a French-Armenian physicist who has worked on quantum field theory, quantum thermodynamics, and theory of measurement.
Balian is a member of French Académie des sciences (Academy of Sciences). His important ...
grandes écoles Grandes may refer to:
* Agustín Muñoz Grandes, Spanish general and politician
* Banksia ser. Grandes, a series of plant species native to Australia
* Grandes y San Martín, a municipality located in the province of Ávila, Castile and León, Spai ...
EDHEC
EDHEC Business School (french: Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales du Nord) is a French grandes écoles business school with campus locations in: Lille, France; Nice, France; Paris, France; London, UK; and Singapore. EDHEC offers its flagship Mas ...
Mines ParisTech
Mines Paris - PSL, officially École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris (until May 2022 Mines ParisTech, also known as École des mines de Paris, ENSMP, Mines de Paris, les Mines, or Paris School of Mines), is a French grande école and a c ...
).
Other people who signed it include former ministers like
The Shift Project published "9 propositions to take Europe to a new area" about as many projects that should be done imperatively to meet the Paris Agreement, according to the Shift. The AFP specifies that these propositions are made "in parallel with the Manifesto" and are not "endorsed by the signatories". The daily economic newspaper ''Les Échos'' highlights the "plan for a 'carbon-free' Europe".
These propositions concern seven sectors: electricity, transportation, construction, industry, food, agriculture and forestry. They are described in depth in the book "Let's decarbonize!".