A fleet of delivery workers weave their electric-propelled bikes between the cyclists along a boulevard divided by a new tramline. Small electric cars drift along uncongested highways, dotted every few kilometers by charging stations. While public transport dominates, the few motorists in their own cars can glimpse the farms that provide flexitarian groceries to towns and biofuels to the remaining airports servicing long-haul flights. Revitalized villages teem with life, after a decades-long boom in agricultural employment. After settling into their well-insulated home, with solar panels donning its roof, a family of erstwhile city-dwellers saunter down to the riverbanks, with cargo vessels coasting by.

These are a few of the everyday-life scenes that the Shift Project, a Paris-based think tank specialized in the energy transition, lets us imagine in its Plan for the Transformation of the French Economy. The world envisaged here is set in 2050, more than a quarter-century after this month’s presidential election. In this timeline, the winner on April 24 kicks off a legislative marathon that came to define the 2022–27 presidential term — the years when the environmental crisis finally emerged as the central focus of French political life.

The world described in the Plan could hardly be a further cry from our own societies, buckling under the sway of petro-power. But it is all the more valuable for it: here is a detailed picture of life in an industrialized society, after the energy transition. What classics of environmental argument, such as William Morris’s 1890 book News from Nowhere, or Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia describe through the moralizing power of the novel, the Shift Project’s Plan provides in a brief panorama written in the more sober language of social science.