You Can't Frack France

After a constitutional court review, France's ban on hydraulic fracturing for natural gas and oil has become "absolute," in the words of Environment Minister Phillipe Martin. In its decision, the court found that the ban, which dates back to 2011 but was challenged by fossil fuel companies companies, was not "disproportionate."

The method companies used to challenge the ban was to challenge the fact that hydraulic fracturing was and is still permitted to be undertaken in production of geothermal power. After reviewing the state of the technology involved, the court found that there is enough difference in the practice and potential environmental harm caused when applied to geothermal versus fossil fuels that prohibiting the latter and permitting the former did not violate France's constitution.

For opponents of fracking around the world, it's being hailed as a victory, rightly so. But the thing I find most interesting in this all is that it's a perfect example of what is the most direct, if in some ways rockiest, method of preventing climate change—simply deciding, and mandating, that a certain resource, or extraction method in this case, will not be used.

As Bill McKibben famously pointed out in his Rolling Stone article two years ago, "Global Warming's Terrifying New Math," and has been brought back to the fore by former Irish president Mary Robinson, we have to leave the vast majority of fossil fuel reserves in the ground to avoid the worst of climate change. We need to leave the oil in the soil. (Well, rock… but the principle remains sound even if the rhyming doesn't align with geology.)

What France is doing is a big first step in that direction, making a decisive policy choice to outlaw something which is polluting the environment, rather than simply regulating it and hoping that an accident doesn't happen while waiting for the market alone to bring down prices of non-polluting alternatives.

Strikingly, the exploration licenses were simply revoked here—sans compensation. If this sort of ban is to be more easily applied, compensating companies for lost future revenue, at least some of it, may be required, even if it's philosophically less pure and shockingly expensive. Keeping 80 percent of fossil fuels in the ground will mean writing off $20 trillion in assets, a figure roughly one-fourth of the world's GDP.

If we're serious about preserving even a semi-stable climate, we need to take much more decisive action in quickly getting off fossil fuels. The French example here is a glimpse of one way to do it.