Germans Want Climate Policy—Just Not Mandatory Heat Pumps in Their Homes

Robert Habeck, Germany's minister for industrial policy and climate protection, has ruminated that the job of astute leaders is to unknot the contradictions of politics—the kind that can stop policymakers cold and run administrations aground. Germany's coalition government of Social Democrats, Greens, and Free Democrats have barreled into a thicket of contradictions that illustrate just how confounding energy and climate policy—and the larger endeavor of obtaining climate neutrality—will prove as the sacrifices it demands of society grow.

Polls, for example, show that Germans are earnestly worried about the climate crisis and in favor of more climate action. The fallout of global warming is one of their most pressing concerns, indeed as it is across Europe. And yet, when it comes to modifying their lifestyles or paying higher prices to curb emissions, most say they’re not willing, or only as much as it doesn't sting.

Habeck's ministry is weathering this contradiction in the form of a nasty backlash against its efforts to transform Germany's heating sector, which accounts for 15 percent of the country's emissions and has recently become a geopolitical red-button conundrum in light of Russia's attack on Ukraine. (Germany had previously relied on Russia for about half of its natural gas; in September 2022, Russia cut off its gas exports to Germany until Berlin lifts sanctions against Russia.)

In contrast to the electricity sector, which Germany has been decarbonizing for decades, heating is practically virgin territory—in the form of hundreds of thousands of buildings, offices, homes, and factories, too, that heat their rooms and power their furnaces with gas. Insulating the country's building stock is treacherously slow: It happens building by building, and the likes of wood pellets, solar thermal, deep geothermal, and bioenergy are not considered sufficiently scalable.

These deficient options explain why the preferred plan is to electrify heating, primarily through the mass installation of heat pumps. An energy-efficient alternative to furnaces, heat pumps—like an air conditioner in reverse—use electricity to transfer heat from a warm space to a cool space. The most common pump is an air-source heat pump, which moves heat between a building and the outside air. By replacing gas boilers, the newest generation of heat pumps can reduce energy costs by as much as 90 percent, and cut emissions by about a quarter relative to gas and three-quarters relative to an electric fan or panel heater. As carbon prices climb higher, gas will become ever more expensive, and in the long run, heat pumps will be the less costly buy.

But the sticking point that the front guard of climate action—to which the Green politician Habeck definitely belongs—must confront is the mindset of his countrymen as the ecological modernization of their society and economy advances. The challenge is to get better at anticipating the degree of sacrifice the everyday German is willing to bear—and ready them for it, one way or another. In Germany, nearly two-thirds of households still heat with fossil fuels, and in a time of inflation and uncertainty, heat pumps are a hefty investment for households on a budget. An air-source pump—about the size of a travel trunk—will run $20,000 to $30,000, including installation, which is about twice as much as a new gas boiler.

This is why hell broke loose when the Habeck ministry's draft law was leaked to the press (reflecting points agreed upon by all three parties in their 2021 governance treaty). It stipulated that old oil and gas heaters that break down after 2024 must be replaced with modern heating systems, namely units that rely on renewable energy for 65 percent of their energy use. This disqualifies gas and oil systems, and amounts to a de facto ban on new fossil fuel heating systems. In the draft plan, the government agreed to subsidize 30 percent of all heat pump installations.

This pronouncement jarred many people, and the government began to see before its eyes nightmare visions of the 2018 "yellow jacket" protests in France, when working-class French people took to the streets en masse in opposition to fuel taxes. Not only Germany's boulevard press but even the Green Party's coalition partners turned on Habeck, thundering that this measure wasn't in the coalition contract (though it was) and that this was far too great a burden to impose on working Germans from one day to another (which the Greens had tried to address but were stifled by their partners.) According to a poll conducted by the arch-populist Bild-Zeitung, which led the charge, 61 percent of Germans were worried about the cost impact. Somewhat fewer respondents thought the ban of gas and oil heating was wrong-headed in the first place.

In hindsight, the Greens should have known better than to so flagrantly expose their Achilles’ heel: the perception that German Greens are elitist snobs with no feeling for ordinary folk with ordinary problems. But the party came around quickly on the snafu, introducing measures to subsidize boiler replacement for low-income people by 80 percent. The size of the subsidy is staggered by income, starting from the original 30 percent for the well-off. Middle-class earners (about $65,000 a year) would qualify for a 40 percent subsidy. People older than 80 are exempt from the law, according to the Green proposal.

The takeaway from the fiasco is that political leaders must test the waters and prepare the ground for the dramatic changes that are around the corner. "One era is drawing to an end—another is beginning," said Habeck. "Because we’ve waited so long to act, these wide-ranging changes will impose on people's day-to-day lives."

"Today, it is becoming increasingly clear that virtually everything must change as soon as possible: housing, driving, heating," writes Die Zeit editor Petra Pinzler. "The energy transition is no longer something that is negotiated at distant climate conferences or in political circles in Berlin and that can be avoided. It has arrived in everyday life. Many people are now realizing that something also has to change in their own boiler room."

Veit Bürger of the Öko-Institut think tank told Foreign Policy that the changes in store for Germany and all countries seriously involved in decarbonization will affect society's strata unevenly. "It won't be win-win-win," he said. "There will be new winners in the long run, sure, but those hit in the short run, like people with lower incomes, they have to be brought along, too."

The law still isn't in the bag: it has to pass both houses of parliament. Perhaps by Jan. 1, 2024, when it should take effect, Germans will have warmed up to a brave, new future of electrical heating. It is, though, as Habeck intoned, a harbinger of much greater changes to come.

Paul Hockenos is a Berlin-based journalist. His recent book is Berlin Calling: A Story of Anarchy, Music, the Wall and the Birth of the New Berlin (The New Press).

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