Energy and raw materials

Two entries on this list look like a pair and are not. L’efficacité énergétique is the one English already owns: the same service for less energy, a better boiler, a thicker wall. La sobriété énergétique is the other half of the French argument, and the word will mislead almost every English reader. La sobriété does cover sobriety in the sense of not drinking, but its ordinary sense is restraint and plainness: la sobriété d’un style, une décoration sobre. Applied to energy it means deliberately wanting less of it — the heating turned down, the room not heated at all — as against the same comfort bought more cheaply. And « energy sobriety » is not English at all. What English has here is a handful of phrases and no noun: « to cut consumption », « to use less », « demand reduction », and, at its most technical, « energy sufficiency ». So the gap sits exactly where the debate is, and the trap runs both ways: read sobriété as « sobriety » and a policy of doing without becomes a remark about alcohol; read it as « efficiency » and the sentence loses the one distinction it was drawing.