“Just Do it”: CNRS Research Director Philippe Drobinski On Europe’s Climate Opportunity
Amid the hype around artificial intelligence and various geopolitical tensions, it can often feel like the fight against climate change has fallen off the global agenda of policymakers and the tech industry.
Which is why it’s good to get the perspective of someone like Phillippe Drobinski, a leading researcher who has been at the forefront of this subject for several decades.
Drobinski is a Research Director at the CNRS, a lead author for the IPCC, and the Director of the Energy4Climate Center, which connects climate science to industry and policy. He is one of a small group of European scientists who can see both the global climate trajectory and the operational reality of turning that science into deployed energy systems.
From his perch, he has seen the sentiment on the urgency of climate change peak and dwindle. Whatever short-term frustrations he may have, Drobinski made it clear that it was important to maintain a broader perspective on the two most fundamental points:
Climate change is real. Solutions exist.
"Europe is a field of opportunities," he said. "We're probably the ones that can lead the energy transition into decarbonization. So, just do it."
Drobinski recently joined Revaia's 2026 Annual General Meeting for a discussion titled "Energy Transition: Why Europe Can Win," moderated by Revaia Partner Jean-Patrice Bellier. He is also collaborating with us on a research project examining how climate constraints will shape the deployment of digital infrastructure, a reminder that is increasingly shaping the future of every industry, including the sectors in which we invest.
When Drobinski speaks, he takes a very pragmatic approach to explaining the inherent tensions that lie at the heart of the difficult choices facing all societies and economies regarding climate change.
He noted that energy accounts for roughly 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions, which makes the climate question and the energy question the same question. And the energy question is, in turn, an economic one, because transforming the energy system means picking winners and losers, and the losers are some of the largest and most politically entrenched industries on the planet.
The tradeoff fallacy
European energy policy is usually framed as a trilemma. Sovereignty, competitiveness, and climate action are positioned as competing priorities, with policymakers asked to choose two.
Drobinski rejects that framing. Europe doesn't face a trilemma, he argues, because it has no fossil fuels. Roughly 80% of Europe's energy system depends on fossil imports. In France the figure drops to about 60%, thanks to a decarbonized power sector, but even in Europe's electricity mix, fossil fuels still account for about 25%. Sovereignty is not a supply question. It is a cost question, and it shows up as a deteriorating trade balance.
The watershed, in his account, was 2022. Three months after the war in Ukraine began, the European Union published RePowerEU, a directive that did two things at once. It put energy sovereignty at the center of European industrial policy. And it broke what Drobinski called "a taboo of all public policies": it admitted that the first priority had to be reducing energy consumption.
"Sobriety, sufficiency, call it whatever you want," he said. The political acceptability of using less, historically untouchable in any European policy document, finally yielded to circumstance.
What followed was, in his view, less a sovereignty success than a swap. Europe reduced its dependence on Russian gas and oil by increasing its dependence on US gas and oil. The supply problem changed shape. The cost problem got worse. And the cost shows up not only in energy bills but in everything downstream of fossil inputs: fertilizers, petrochemicals, and the long tail of industrial materials whose prices Europe doesn't control.
So the European energy transition is not, primarily, a climate policy. It is an industrial sovereignty strategy that also aligns with climate policy.
Deployment is the bottleneck
Drobinski is unsentimental about one thing: Europe is not short on solutions. "I challenge you to have the same narrative on food transition," he said. "Food is very complex. But energy, we have solutions." Renewables, nuclear, batteries, EVs, heat pumps. The toolkit is mature, deployable, and in many cases already cost-competitive, he said.
His list of priorities starts with electrification of usage: mobility, heating, and industry. This is the precondition for scaling low-carbon power, because without electrification and demand, the additional clean electrons have nowhere to go. Second, recycling and raw materials, because Europe has no more of the latter than it has hydrocarbons.
Electrification carries its own complications. Electricity can't be stored at scale, which means supply and demand have to be matched in real time across an entire continental grid. That is a fundamental shift in how the energy system operates, and it creates a deep, durable demand for exactly the kind of digital infrastructure and optimization software that European companies are well-positioned to build.
The technology is there. The policy framework is there. The cost arguments now run in the same direction as the climate arguments. And yet European deployment keeps lagging.
Two syndromes standing in the way
We asked Drobinski why Europe, with its universities, public research, patents, and engineering depth, still struggles to turn climate innovation into deployed companies. He cited the familiar structural problem, Europe's early-stage funding gap relative to the United States. Even when a French researcher does want to build, and is built to build, the capital available to them is thinner than what a peer at MIT or Stanford would walk into.
However, he believes there are deeper cultural issues that need to be addressed. He described two patterns he sees in the academic ecosystem.
In the first scenario, an academic develops an innovation. They like their innovation. They secure funding to advance the technology readiness level and refine the prototype. And then, when the moment comes to make the leap, to incorporate, raise capital, and build a company, the researcher realizes for the first time what that road actually requires. And gives up.
"He doesn't know the full road," Drobinski said. "And so, we probably lose a lot of innovation there."
In the second scenario, the researcher wants to build a company, but only as its CEO. The arrival of a business co-founder or an operator is experienced as theft. "If he's not shaped to be a CEO," Drobinski said, "then of course we should not fund it."
His prescription: train academics in commercial thinking from the start of their careers, not at the end. And be honest, as a funder, about which scientists are builders and which are not. That includes a greater focus on design and adoption. You can build the best technology in the world, Drobinski said, but if you can't deploy it because no one wants it, it doesn't matter.
In all of these cases, Drobinski urged everyone to adopt bigger thinking when seeking solutions. The biggest mistake, he argued, was looking in silos. The scope of a problem such as climate change demands systems thinking.
“Energy is connected to everything,” he said. “When we discussed materials, we discussed water, biodiversity, and food production. There's competition for resources, competition for land. So as soon as we're discussing the energy transition, we have to take it as part of this holistic. And we have to address it in a holistic way.”