“The energy transition didn’t become unpopular because people hate the planet. It became unpopular because it pays the rich to feel virtuous while everyone else pays the bill.”
- adaptationguide.com
Climate Policy for the Rich, Bills for Everyone Else
How Governments Turned the Energy Transition into a Welfare Program for the Wealthy
For millions of people, behaving in a “climate-friendly” way is astonishingly easy.
All you need is property.
If you own a house, you get to choose: a climate-friendly heating system, generously subsidized by the state. You benefit twice—first because you already had the capital to build wealth in the first place, and second because taxpayers now help you increase the value of your property. Over time, you save energy, save money, and walk away with a modernized asset.
Add an electric car in the driveway, charge it from your privately owned rooftop solar system, plug it into your wall box—also subsidized—and congratulations: your personal energy transition is complete.
You are officially “green.”
And you were paid to get there.
Let’s be clear: nobody begrudges people who can afford this setup. But let’s stop pretending this is climate justice. What this actually shows is something far uglier:
The wealthy can buy their way out of the fossil energy crisis—using public money. Everyone else is trapped.
Subsidies That Flow Upward
Current heating subsidies actively reinforce inequality. They do so quietly, bureaucratically, and very efficiently.
Yes, it makes sense to incentivize homeowners. Governments are asking private households to invest tens of thousands of euros into climate protection—investments that benefit society as a whole and determine whether national emissions targets are met.
And yes, the policy works technically: more households are choosing heat pumps over gas boilers, despite years of culture-war hysteria about “heating bans.”
But here’s the part politicians prefer not to emphasize:
A large share of the subsidy money goes to people with high incomes—people who would have installed a heat pump anyway.
This is not climate policy.
This is a transfer of public money to private wealth.
The so-called “social component” introduced by the government sounds good on paper. Households earning under €40,000 in taxable income can receive up to 70 percent of eligible costs.
In reality, this changes almost nothing.
Retirees with old houses. Low-income owners with leaky buildings. People without savings, without credit access, without risk tolerance—they don’t take the leap. Because even 30 percent of €30,000 is still €9,000 they do not have.
And there’s another dirty secret nobody likes to say out loud:
Heat pumps in Germany are absurdly expensive—partly because massive subsidies inflated prices and enabled pure profiteering.
This is what economists call rent extraction. Everyone else calls it a scam.
A Country of Renters Locked Out of the Transition
Germany is a country of renters. Renters have less wealth, lower incomes, and almost no control over how they heat their homes.
They don’t choose the system.
They don’t choose the fuel.
They don’t choose the future cost.
When landlords install gas heating again, they quietly dump long-term costs onto tenants. Not just rising fossil fuel prices—but exploding gas grid fees that will hit hardest precisely as fewer people remain connected.
And who lives in cheap, poorly insulated buildings?
People with little money.
The same people already struggling are now expected to shoulder the most volatile, expensive, and politically neglected energy costs in the system.
If that isn’t structural injustice, nothing is.
This Was Entirely Avoidable
Think tanks like Agora Energiewende—and many others—have laid out how this could be fixed without restarting the heating culture war.
The solutions are not radical:
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Gradually reduce subsidies for wealthy homeowners
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Massively increase support for low-income owners
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Tie landlord subsidies to real rent caps
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Protect tenants from “green” modernization becoming a new extraction tool
This is boring policy work. It exists. It’s ready.
And yet the government does the opposite.
Instead of correcting the distributional failure, it plans to weaken heating standards. The result is predictable:
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Fewer households transition
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Inequality deepens
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Climate policy becomes visibly class-biased
At that point, the energy transition stops being a collective project and becomes what it already looks like to millions:
A luxury lifestyle upgrade for the rich—paid for by everyone else.
Don’t Blame Climate Protection. Blame How It’s Done.
When public acceptance of climate policy collapses, politicians love to blame “ignorance,” “populism,” or “resistance to change.”
That’s cowardice.
People are not rejecting climate protection.
They are rejecting being screwed.
They see governments writing checks for:
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electric SUVs
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rooftop solar on million-euro homes
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private wall boxes
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subsidized property value increases
—all while telling renters and low-income households to “tighten their belts” for the planet.
That’s not a transition.
That’s redistribution upward with a green label.
And no amount of moral preaching will fix that.
If climate policy keeps rewarding wealth and punishing poverty, it will fail—not because people hate the planet, but because they recognize injustice when they live inside it.
Climate collapse isn’t inevitable.
But a class-war energy transition absolutely is—unless this changes.
yours truly,
Adaptation-Guide
