Climate policy today is not merely being sidelined — it is actively under attack. That applies not only when climate action is framed as a justice-driven transformation, but even when it appears as ecological modernization, which until recently was mainstream. A new battleground has emerged around the planned phase-out of combustion engines by 2035, which was long a central part of the European Green Deal. Looking at Germany, it’s not just the fascist party AfD and conservative party CDU/CSU that are calling to soften the European ban; also the biggest industrial trade union IG Metall has begun to echo key arguments of the auto lobby and is calling for more flexible CO₂ rules to protect jobs. The €500-billion special fund for infrastructure and climate neutrality — passed even before the conservative-social-democratic coalition took office — now appears eroded by inflation and partly being redirected toward military purposes and old vested-interests. 

What is shifting is not only the discursive frontline — from designing the future to defending against threats, from mitigation to adaptation, from a shared new beginning to the protection of particular interests. Underlying these shifts is a broad change in mentalities: what was once framed as a promise of mutually beneficial transformation has morphed into a struggle to defend established unsustainable lifestyles. For many, the ecological question has ceased to be a project of collective shaping and is increasingly experienced as an imposition.

The political and discursive reprioritizations reflect a wider social change: efforts toward transformation are facing mounting resistance, and signs of “transformation fatigue” are increasingly evident (Beckert 2024; Staab 2022). How did this come about? A popular explanation blames advocates of ambitious climate policy for ignoring “the social question” and overburdening the less affluent with an abstract “moral ecology,” provoking “greenlash” as a predictable reaction from people exhausted by continuous change (Mau et al. 2023; Huber 2022). From the standpoint of our research on socio-ecological mentalities, that is not entirely wrong — but it’s a one-sided simplification of a far more complex reality. Crucially, the present defensive turn in political priorities and public debate does not mainly happen among the often-cited “overburdened disadvantaged” groups. Rather, it occurs primarily among materially comfortable middle- and upper-class groups who feel their lifestyle is at risk.

A triangular relationship, not polarization

In our book The New Socio-Ecological Class Conflict, co-authored with Martin Fritz and Linda von Faber, we reconstruct how the population is segmented, along lines that roughly mirror social-structural differences, into distinct factions that take different — or even antagonistic — positions about the why, what, and how of socio-ecological transformation (Eversberg et al. 2024). Our analysis of a representative survey from late 2021 revealed a picture that confirms neither with the common narrative of straightforward polarization (Otteni/Weisskircher 2022) nor with that of broad societal consensus (Mau et al. 2023) and rather presents a triangular relationship among three major spectra of socio-ecological mentalities — socially specific patterns of perception, evaluation, feeling and action.

Public debate on polarization can be seen to address the relation between two of these spectra: the eco-social spectrum (still strongly pro-climate-policy, concentrated in the academically educated strata) and the defensive-reactive spectrum (overwhelmed by change and receptive to authoritarian appeals, overrepresented in precarious, disadvantaged social positions). That stark opposition — often framed politically as Greens vs. AfD (Otteni/Weisskircher 2022) — obscures the third, numerically largest group, which in such an account may be (mis)taken for the “moderate” centre: the conservative growth-oriented spectrum. This spectrum comprises the predominant mentalities of the materially affluent middle class — the people who long made up the social base of Germany’s export-led growth model and the Merkel-era policy consensus, and who benefited from long-term prosperity gains. This is the crucial site for understanding what has shifted.

The end of the deal

For many years, governing politicians entertained an implicit deal with this stratum, whose members were deeply invested in business-as-usual in both their productive and consumptive capacities: “we will talk about climate and transformation; we will modernize, liberalize and green the country, but only gently – allowing life to continue largely unchanged. Your material prosperity can continue to rise under the promise of ’inclusive‘ and ’green‘ growth”.

Among those addressed by this deal, that commitment translated into high abstract support for climate policy in surveys — for example, a 2018 survey for the Federal Environmental Agency found that roughly 70% wanted to prioritise climate protection in energy and agricultural policy. Less visible, however, were the tacit conditions under which this support was granted behind that support: climate action was okay as long as it did not demand any kind of personal sacrifice or limit one’s “freedom” to own and consume as before.

The new defensive consensus and the radicalization of the change-averse middle class

By late 2021, that deal was clearly unraveling: the promise that transformation and unencumbered prosperous living-as-usual could continue side by side no longer held in the face of multiple crises. The traffic-light coalition initially tried to respond with a forward-looking, still eco-modernist idea of “progress.” Over time, however, diverging interpretations of “progress” generated increasing centrifugal pressures within the coalition: one wing moved rhetorically toward transformation, the other toward preserving established lifestyles. The political consequences are well known.

What unfolded at the level of mentalities — already visible in 2021 — was equally important: the conservative growth-oriented spectrum increasingly reacted to mounting crises by rejecting what they perceived as “impositions” and by reasserting its accustomed expectations. The earlier balance between “we need to change” and “we want to go on living as we do” tipped decisively toward the resolute defense of their prosperity and the given mode of living.

To be clear: this concerns primarily parts of the middle and upper classes. Measures such as the heating law, the combustion-engine ban and debates about speed limits appeared to many as unacceptable violations of the promise to protect their prosperity. They began to expect, ever more openly, a renewal of that promise — even if it meant scaling back climate ambitions. In the 2025 federal election campaign, CDU/CSU and FDP directly catered to this demand, programmatically backtracking on climate policy and thus moving closer to the openly regressive positions of AfD and BSW.

While undue hardship and social inequity are certainly facts, the key driver of the shift in political climate is this defensive turn of the prosperous middle class, and the instrumental use of arguments around inequality in defense of material privilege. The growing gap between the need for change and the non-negotiability of given modes of living and expectations has produced a new defensive consensus (Blühdorn 2024) across spectra — against climate policy and transformation. This consensus de-polarizes and de-conflictualizes climate politics: in place of contestation around direction and pace of change, a tacit agreement to maintain business as usual has taken hold. The unconditional preservation of present lifestyles is becoming an increasingly widely shared priority, while the eco-social spectrum — once the clear counterpole — is diminished, fragmented, and marginalized. At the same time, the change-averse segments of the middle class are undergoing radicalization.

The political dead end of promises

It is true that climate policy has long failed to treat climate action as a question of distribution and justice. The greater failure, however, was the refusal — on the part of politics and sustainability research alike — to acknowledge the extent of change and adaptation that would need to be required of the wealthy. For too long, hope persisted that the climate could be saved by technical fixes alone, without significant changes to accustomed lifestyles or the distribution of wealth. Political parties have avoided that conflict to preserve popular support, thus cementing long-standing illusions. Repeating such promises for electoral gain is politically irresponsible and paternalistic.

Out of the dead end: honest climate policy

To escape this trap of empty promises, climate and sustainability policy must be honest and explicit about its aims: it must cease promising an unrealistic continuity of existing lifestyles of the wealthy. At the same time, it must reject the dominant narrative of sacrifice and burden. That does not mean replacing empty promises with new ones — for instance, by asserting that only a few super-rich people will have to do with less. Rather, the task is to render a socially just climate policy imaginable as a program centered on fairness and improved quality of life for many, especially the disadvantaged (Aigner 2021).

At the heart of such a constructive vision should be an understanding of climate policy as a program for better social infrastructures. In this spirit, the Expert Council for Climate Issues, in 2025, criticized the traffic-light coalition’s climate subsidy approach as socially unbalanced: subsidies mostly went to households that could afford houses and electric cars, while the promised “climate allowance” — which would have helped those living sustainably in small rental apartments and using public transport — never materialized. Alongside socially-tiered financial support, the Council recommended expanding public infrastructure that enables participation for all in resource-efficient ways and improves many people’s quality of life.

Infrastructure, not illusions

That requires massive investment, which is hard to achieve under the limits that Germany’s “debt brake” imposes on future investment. Yet the special fund for infrastructure and climate neutrality adopted by the black-red coalition demonstrates that the scale of investment needed is not utopian — the funds simply need to be allocated differently: toward a strategic transformation to climate-neutral, public-interest, and widely accessible systems.

Instead of making ever less credible growth promises, climate policy should emphasize synergies between emissions reduction and social justice, and show that transformation does not need not imply wholesale loss but can increase the quality of life for many. The Austrian Climate Council (APCC) laid this out in detail in its report Structures for a Climate-Friendly Life (Görg et al. 2023). Some of the most developed ideas for infrastructure-oriented climate policy currently come from the degrowth debate (Schmelzer et al. 2022; Kallis et al. 2025). Restrictions and bans that primarily affect the wealthy (e.g., private jets, caps on incomes and wealth, ecological taxes, limits on luxury consumption) can create legitimacy for change. An enabling “foundational economy” that guarantees access to social infrastructure for all — from public transport to energy supply to affordable housing — underpins climate protection because meeting needs through public infrastructure is lighter on resources than doing so through private ownership (Neckel 2022).

Property, redistribution, responsibility

Private property, as we argue in The Socio-Ecological Class Conflict (Eversberg et al. 2024), is part of what makes current social structures unsustainable. Redistribution from top to bottom — and from private to public — is therefore essential not only for financing, but because reduced inequality increases support for change. This is also the gaining legitimacy with parts of the middle strata: their approval stems less from ideological commitment than from a felt sense of security that new ownership and organizational models mean participation rather than expropriation. Public-interest models and public infrastructures — from energy cooperatives to solidarity-based housing to citizens’ funds and public transport — must be experienced as collective security strategies to counter the impulse to defend vested interests. Beyond credit-based investment, the affluent must also be held accountable, for example by a wealth levy under Article 106 of the Basic Law. This instrument, constitutionally intended for extraordinary crises, could channel the resources that a wealthy society like Germany doubtlessly has to where they are needed, and help redress social inequalities as a condition for rendering transitions to sustainable and widely accessible ways of living conceivable.

The need to question current property relations and the recognition that sustainability goals require redistributing societal wealth from private to public make this approach the direct antithesis of the new defense consensus. Fully articulated, it will face fierce opposition. Yet real-world examples show such redistribution and innovations in ownership models are far from utopian: municipalities like Leipzig and Freiburg have enhanced public capacity by remunicipalizing energy and housing services; projects like the Mietshäuser Syndikat and energy cooperatives withdraw regional value creation from market logics, reorient it toward needs, and democratize it. Failed privatizations in sectors like hospitals illustrate how market logics can undermine social and ecological goals. The lesson is clear: where ownership is organized collectively, legitimacy for change grows — where privatization remains dominant, resistance to change tends to intensify.

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Editorial Note:

This article is produced in collaboration with Makronom and the Economists for Future DE and was originally written in German language. In this blog series, authors were given an impulse or prompt to react to. The articles published in 2026 follow the theme of Anti-Fascist Economics, where authors are prodded to rethink social security to counteract authoritarian and nationalist tendencies. Interventions in this series think through welfare state, property relations, pension systems and institutional re-designs in such a way that democratic cohesion, ecological stability and economic resilience are strengthened. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not reflect the views of the organisations involved.

About the authors:

Dennis Eversberg is Professor of Environmental Sociology at Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main.

Matthias Schmelzer holds the Professorship for Socio-Ecological Transformation Research at the Europa-Universität Flensburg.

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