Who pays for the energy transition?

The spotlight provides insight into the results of the project “Group Appeals – The Political Communication of Eco-Social Policies in Germany.” In it, ZSP Policy Grantees Dr. Philip Rathgeb and Dr. Leonce Röth examine the amended Gebäudeenergiegesetz (GEG) of the traffic light coalition government in terms of its social distribution effects and ask how the law was communicated with regard to the groups affected.

In addition to the distributional policy analysis, a specially trained language model (LLM) was used to analyze 2,736 articles on the GEG from ten parties and twelve online and print media between January 2023 and December 2024. The focus was on climate ambitions, group references, and socio-political positions.

• The GEG has significant social shortcomings. Low-income landlords, owner-occupiers, and tenants are not sufficiently taken into account in the funding.
  The parties in the traffic light coalition government recognized this imbalance too late and communicated it inadequately.
• Opposition parties focused more strongly on the social shortcomings of the law. However, the rationale of social justice was used primarily by the AfD, but also by the CDU/CSU, as a tool to undermine the climate ambitions of the law. Calls for social policy reform were only communicated by the Left Party.
• The discourse surrounding the GEG was highly polarized overall. While a conservative camp consisting of parties and media outlets (CDU/CSU, FDP, BILD, Die Welt, FAZ) viewed the GEG with cost-critical skepticism, a left-wing camp called for more far-reaching climate social policy. The AfD and BSW formed a fundamental opposition to the climate policy ambitions of the GEG. With the exception of the Greens, there are no real supporters of the law in the debate.

The results make it clear that governments must consider the social consequences of climate policy reforms at an early stage and in a differentiated manner in their political design and public communication in order to promote acceptance and counteract the instrumentalization of social issues to ward off ambitious climate policy.