After Europe’s summer heatwaves, climate salience is at its highest in years, yet it’s clear the past frameworks used to mobilise majorities are crumbling amid an ongoing cost of living crisis and energy insecurity. To penetrate politically, climate communications must fit within the material realities of voters’ lives. In other words, the key to mobilising climate action is to demonstrate that the green transition can make European countries more secure and people’s lives cheaper.

The salience of climate change has been on a downward trajectory post-2019. That year is remembered by many as the moment climate politics broke containment: Ursula von der Leyen’s newly elected European Commission mandated Net Zero by 2050 after mass mobilisations in the streets demanding climate action and a strong performance by Green parties in that year’s European elections.

The years that followed could not have been more different. Pandemic lockdowns broke the wave of climate protests, and the subsequent cost-of-living crisis forced climate down the political agenda. There, the issue languished, rarely emphasised by mainstream parties except occasionally by far-right agitators attempting to stir up “greenlash”. 

Even before the cost of living crisis, climate struggled to get more than 10 per cent of European electorates ranking it among their top issues. While polling shows that people hold ambient concern for the climate crisis, it remained a second-order issue. The movement has thus existed in political purgatory: marked by high awareness and intense polarisation, yet devoid of broader electoral momentum.

The recent summer of extreme weather may have broken that impasse. New research we conducted in August at Mandate Research, a strategy consulting firm for political campaigns, shows a definite spike in voters’ climate concern during this summer’s heatwaves. Among the countries we polled,¹ this effect was particularly visible in Hungary and across Southern Europe, where Spain and France in particular were hit by devastating wildfires. In Hungary, 91 per cent of voters report being worried about climate change, followed closely by Italy (81 per cent), France (80 per cent), and Spain (68 per cent).

This worry translated directly into issue salience. In Sweden, the Netherlands, France, and the UK, roughly a fifth of voters now rank the environment and climate change among their top two issues. In Hungary, salience catapulted from a spring baseline of 3 per cent to a staggering 25 per cent, making it the second most important issue in the country in August. Hungarian citizens have had a particularly shocking confrontation with energy precarity this summer. The most severe drought in over a century partially dried up the Danube, causing a temporary shutdown of the nuclear facility supplying nearly half the country’s power.

Salience numbers are famously difficult to budge. The belief that climate politics had hit a saturation point, with returns diminishing as voters grew accustomed to extreme weather rather than increasing with the severity of the climate crisis, had convinced many mainstream parties that the issue was a vote loser. However, double-digit salience increases in the span of a few months demonstrate that European voters are not yet numb to peril.

This momentum is unlikely to fully evaporate in the colder months. With El Niño intensifying towards historic peaks and European gas storage levels concerningly low ahead of the winter season, the climate conversation is poised to shift from record heatwaves to heating bills and the threat of more extreme weather events.

The failure of old stories

Reclaiming a seat at the table is good news, but squandering this moment with outdated messaging would be fatal.

While rising salience presents an undeniable political opening, progressives must not misread the room. Affordability, immigration, housing, and healthcare still rank above climate in most of the countries we surveyed, and overall concern has met but not surpassed the 2019 peak.
More importantly, the world has changed significantly since then, and so have the ways people relate to the climate crisis. The failures of green policies, the rise of the far right (with its own narratives and solutions to the climate emergency) and the shifting geopolitical landscape all demand a different approach from progressives. Reclaiming a seat at the table is good news, but squandering this moment with outdated messaging would be fatal.

This risk is most visible with “Net Zero”, a 2050 target enshrined in both the Paris Agreement and the European Green Deal. When asked to rank environmental policy goals from highest to lowest priority, “achieving Net Zero emissions” ranked dead last across every single country surveyed. In Germany (-37), the UK (-42), France (-35), and the US (-40), Net Zero received deeply negative net priority ratings. Voters overwhelmingly prefer tangible, immediate objectives: building clean energy, protecting nature and wildlife, and reducing energy costs.

Furthermore, the public is deeply sceptical about the feasibility of Net Zero targets. Well over half of respondents believe it is unlikely their country will make meaningful progress towards the 2050 goal. The attempt to bundle various policy aims together and rebrand it as Net Zero has clearly failed to reach voters; repetition has led to abstraction and meaninglessness.

Even more troubling is the perceived distribution of economic costs. Almost half of Europeans surveyed believe that pro-environmental policies have left ordinary people in their country worse off, including 54 per cent in the Netherlands, 46 per cent in Spain, 45 per cent in Germany, 45 per cent in France, and 42 per cent in the UK.

This perception persists despite measurable, real-world improvements in air quality, public health indicators, and biodiversity conservation across Europe. Policies that treated emissions reductions as the target and affordability as an afterthought have clearly reached their limit, and they are even less likely to succeed amid a prolonged cost of living crisis.  Relentless far-right framing that depicts environmentalism as technocracy has also played its part in convincing people that green policy is synonymous with meaningless sacrifice and elite control.

Today, progressives have to contend with thin, transactional support for climate action. When asked if they would support renewable energy, people respond positively. However, when renewable investment is posited as requiring taxation or public service cuts, this support turns sharply negative across nearly all European countries.

Moralistic, future-focused arguments and lofty green targets celebrated in the Fridays for Future past have lost momentum. The timelines environmental policies require are inescapable, but so is the need to have people on board a green project. Voters want a green future, but they want a job and food on the table for their families an order of magnitude more.

Reconfiguring climate politics

While affordability concerns overshadow melting ice caps, they also provide an opportunity for the climate movement to execute a strategic pivot. The convergence of climate extremes, geopolitical volatility, and rising utility bills creates a narrow window to reframe clean energy as a practical, necessary alternative to fossil fuels. Low riverbeds impact the cost of transportation, hot summers make it hard to cool power plants, and a warming atmosphere yields bad harvests and increases the price of everyday goods such as olive oil, coffee, and chocolate. Framed this way, the green transition is less a matter of global leadership and blue-sky thinking than a shield against further economic insecurity.

Voters do make the connection between renewable power and structural affordability. Clear majorities across Europe agree that transitioning to renewable energy will lower energy bills and reduce dependence on volatile fossil fuel markets. In a similar vein, expanding renewable capacity is consistently ranked by voters as the single most effective action governments can take to lower energy costs.

This is reflected in message testing across Europe. Narratives focused on immediate material outcomes, such as capping household energy bills by taxing fossil fuel windfall profits, or protecting national energy security from foreign autocrats, consistently outperform abstract moral appeals.

Right-wing figures like Giorgia Meloni in Italy and Kemi Badenoch in the UK have attempted to present themselves as pragmatic leaders defending working families against “arbitrary climate targets”. Support for nuclear energy as part of the solution is often featured in this kind of discourse – and it resonates among voters, ranking as the top climate priority in Sweden and Poland, and a close second in the UK, France, and the Netherlands.

During this summer’s heatwaves, French far-right leader Marine Le Pen also tried to pitch herself as a pragmatic leader by advocating a “grand plan” for air conditioning. While this will neither solve the climate crisis nor adapt our cities to the heat, it put her opponents on the defensive.

All this shows that progressives can no longer lay exclusive claim to the climate issue. The newfound salience of the climate crisis will only translate into votes if they offer solutions to people’s material concerns. In this context, conceding the language of pragmatism to the Right would be a strategic mistake.

Voters want a green future, but they want a job and food on the table for their families an order of magnitude more.

Rebuilding majorities

Europeans have not abandoned the green transition. Across the continent, solid majorities recognise that drastic change is needed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, and they believe that green investment can help make their lives easier.

However, voters are no longer responding to the argument as it has been framed and delivered over the past decade, and hoping that extreme weather will shock electorates back to reason is bad politics. Many Europeans are providing the movement an opening because of the energy and cost of living crisis and security concerns. The climate movement must take heed of this, and meet voters where they are.

Civil society and climate movements can continue to highlight immediate threats from extreme weather to maintain emotional urgency – after all, this type of messaging still proves the most effective in boosting the salience of the climate crisis. But political parties competing for government must ground their vision in tangible economic benefits. By dismantling the abstract vocabulary of Net Zero, confronting corporate profiteering, and presenting renewable energy as a tool for bill reduction and sovereign security, progressives can begin to rebuild a majority for climate action.

1. Sweden, The Netherlands, the UK, Germany, Spain, Italy, France, Hungary, Poland, and the US. ︎

With parts of the feminist movement drifting towards personal empowerment and green actors emphasising cost of living issues, few voices remain connecting the dots between ecological and feminist struggles. Yet studies show that rising temperatures increase domestic violence, and women are more heavily impacted by food scarcity during draughts and floods. How to build counterpower at times of gender and climate backlash? Ros Taylor spoke with the author of Feminism for a World on Fire. 

When I meet Natasha Walter towards the end of August, Britain’s arid summer is at last beginning to ebb. A few drops of rain have fallen on the yellow, desiccated parks, but not enough to revive them. In the past eight weeks, north London has had just two millimetres of rain.

But the drought and wildfires barely impinge on the political round. Andy Burnham, the new prime minister, belatedly sends a text message to Britons urging them not to light unnecessary fires. His new secretary for energy security and net zero, Miatta Fahnbulleh, will open up a North Sea gas field for drilling. Her Conservative shadow, Andrew Bowie, declares himself the “energy security secretary”, dropping any reference to net zero.

As temperature records are broken, the fight seems to have gone out of Britain’s environmental movement. Perhaps they expected the proof of global heating and multiple energy crises to concentrate politicians’ minds on the green transition. If so, they were very wrong. Instead, the talk now is almost exclusively of adaptation and how to generate enough electricity for air conditioning. Even the Green Party now mainly focuses on the cost of living and overheated workplaces. This has helped them in the polls, but it has done little to keep up the pressure to phase out fossil fuels.

Climate of repression

For activists like Walter, who was arrested in 2019 at a climate protest, the sense of powerlessness is distressing. Even as the Labour party made progress on decarbonising the grid and expanded wind and solar energy, it continued to crack down hard on environmental protesters. Judges imposed long prison sentences on people blocking roads and prevented them from mentioning their motives in court, so as not to sway a jury. In 2024, nine people who were arrested on their way to a planned action at Heathrow Airport spent ten months on remand before they appeared in court. The harsh sentences have significantly reduced climate protests in the UK. The government has also designated the pro-Palestinian group Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, meaning that anyone who expresses support for it is liable to be prosecuted for a criminal offence.

“I feel so angry about it,” Walter says. “I really feel that there was a possibility when the first wave of climate activism was happening. You know, around 2018, a lot of people were taking to the streets. It was disruptive, [though] it wasn’t terribly disruptive to most people’s everyday lives. And I think it brought a lot of people together. It coalesced a sort of sense of urgency, and the community around that urgency.”

“And I think that some mainstream political parties on the left or towards the left could have done a lot more to connect with that energy, to learn from why people were coming out, and actually to support that energy and work with those desires to find ways forward. I find it really so baffling. And I feel so angry with this Labour government.”

She admits some of the actions “weren’t brilliantly planned or executed” – Just Stop Oil activists throwing soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in the National Gallery in 2022, for instance – “but that’s OK. These sorts of movements are messy. But I just find it insane, the level of repression, and how little mainstream liberals and conservatives, left and right, have stepped up to this.”

Time for ecofeminism

Walter came relatively late to climate activism. In The New Feminism (1998), she argued that women needed to stop policing each other’s behaviour and focus on securing political power and equality. Living Dolls (2010) tackled the sexualisation of culture and what it meant for women. Her latest book, Feminism for a World on Fire, imagines a feminism that acknowledges what the climate crisis means for women, especially but not exclusively in the Global South. Feminism, she argues, has let itself be subsumed by the consumer society and dreams of personal empowerment. It has stopped being political. She wrote Feminism for a World on Fire partly out of a sense of frustration that the environmental movement in the UK seemed to have no space for ecofeminism.

“When I was in Extinction Rebellion, I was really struggling to get women together to talk about feminist ideas in the environmental movement.” There was an emphasis on care, she says, and feminist principles guided the movement, but somehow it did not quite come together. Yet, for Walter, the movements are meaningless without each other. “Environmentalism without feminism is a patriarchy in the forest, but the women’s movement without environmentalism is a women’s centre on a dead planet.”

Bringing the two movements together is all the more important when mainstream feminism has become a marketable commodity to which the big tech companies pay lip service, and where women must climb over each other to reach the top. She says “this rhetoric of Lean In, ‘You go girl, give zero fucks, keep moving on, keep moving up’” reached an apogee in 2025, when Amazon’s chairman Jeff Bezos launched six women into sub-orbit to promote his Blue Origin space programme.

Feminism has let itself be subsumed by the consumer society and dreams of personal empowerment. It has stopped being political.

“The interests of capitalism feed off that kind of self-empowerment. It suits capitalism. You can sell women more goods, more stuff with the message that you can liberate yourself just through shopping, through constant makeovers and renewal… I was quite shocked when I started using Instagram by how many women that I thought of as feminists are engaged there in just selling stuff.”

Platforms have enabled some women to establish vast personal brands, but have also fed a form of apolitical narcissism. In the past decade, Walter says, the women’s movement has atomised, with “less and less empathy and solidarity between women from different parts of the world and different backgrounds.”

As director of the charity Women for Refugee Women, she found herself increasingly frustrated by performative, celebrity-driven events that felt very distant from the lives of ordinary women. At the same time, charities working with vulnerable women became more professional. There is more transparency and clearer guidance about how to act, but something has been lost. In the 1980s, one activist told her, women who reported domestic abuse would be supported, driven to a refuge, and hugged. “Now I see my colleagues taking that same call. They are polite. They go through the safeguarding checklist. They give her another number to call…” Grassroots work is vital because it is “where women find the tools for survival”.

In the UK, the Rochdale child sexual abuse scandal, where girls were raped by groups of men of mainly Pakistani origin between the 1990s and 2010s, has become a rallying point for the far-right Reform UK and Restore parties. They claim that the failure to prosecute the rapists for years shows that feminists did not protect girls for fear of being seen as racist. Walter, however, argues that the scandal persisted because the police did not listen to women working in frontline organisations.

She has spent time with women’s groups in the Middle East, and Feminism for a World on Fire reminds readers that however frightening global heating seems in Europe and the US, it has even worse consequences for the Global South. The impact specifically on women is under-researched, but the work we do have shows that women are more likely to die than men when food is scarce and during droughts and floods. Domestic violence rises during climate crises. A UN study found that it increases by 4.7 per cent for every 1-degree Celsius rise in global temperature. Another study on heatwaves in Kenya found that pregnant women were vulnerable to cardiovascular problems in high temperatures and were still expected to collect water. Feminism for a World on Fire reminds readers that however frightening global heating seems in Europe and the US, it has even worse consequences for the Global South. The impact specifically on women is under-researched, but the work we do have shows that women are more likely to die than men when food is scarce and during droughts and floods. Domestic violence rises during climate crises. A UN study found that it increases by 4.7 per cent for every 1-degree Celsius rise in global temperature. Another study on heatwaves in Kenya found that pregnant women were vulnerable to cardiovascular problems in high temperatures and were still expected to collect water.

Domestic violence rises during climate crises, 4.7 per cent for every 1-degree Celsius rise in global temperature.

“When societies are stressed, men are often taking out that stress and that precarity on women … It’s here, it’s now. You know, women’s crops are already failing because of the droughts and then the cyclones in Malawi. The girls living in the areas affected by floods in Bangladesh, they’re already missing out on school, they’re already being married off early. Their future is gone.”

Involvement at all levels

How to conclude a book that sets out the scale of the crisis and the misery to come? Walter admits it was difficult. She feels the least satisfactory sections of her previous two books about feminism were her efforts to direct people to organisations that were doing good work. Instead, “We need to have more faith in the idea that we can get involved in our community,” and organise to achieve a particular goal.

She is drawn to local activism, partly as an antidote to the sense of powerlessness that has seized the environmental movement, but also as an alternative to the endless scroll of digital “engagement”, a “relentless roll call of pain” – and because, as 1980s activists knew, only by meeting people face-to-face do we come to understand the messy complexity of their lives.

Walter acknowledges that the kinds of frustrations and compromises involved in unglamorous, local activism are by no means easy. “I’m not romanticising it, but I think it’s the only way to rebuild in the face of what we’re facing now.” Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s new book End Times Fascism offers a similar vision for local activism in the face of Big Tech dominance and the rise of the far right.

I ask Walter why so few women, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez excepted, are leading the charge against Trumpian politics and environmental destruction. Zohran Mamdani is the great hope of socialists in the US, and the figureheads of the British left are men: Zack Polanski leads the Greens in England and Wales, while Labour has never had a female leader in its entire history. The European far right, by contrast, has cultivated several charismatic women leaders, including Giorgia Meloni, Alice Weidel, and Marine Le Pen.

“I think women who try and emerge on the left as leaders just feel too disruptive,” Walter says. “They break the mould of what our societies want to see in women too much, and they’re not valued. They face such a barrage of misogyny from their enemies. It just makes them unviable as leaders, as we saw with Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris. I’m not saying they were particularly charismatic or progressive leaders. Very problematic, I think, in many ways.” Both the former New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern and Finland’s Sanna Marin left frontline politics before middle age also because of intense backlash.

But the fact that female leadership is lacking should not deter women from getting involved. “We need more women climate leaders. But I also think we need more good followership. I think we need, as women, to get involved in stuff.”

“And you can make a change by contributing whatever you contribute. I really like telling stories and drawing out threads. But I also like doing the other stuff, just standing at the stalls at the eco-fair or going along and helping in the community garden or with the drop-in at the women’s centre.”

Stepping up

An earlier generation of radical feminists might observe that this is what middle-class British women like Walter have done for centuries – volunteered in their communities, unpaid and largely unnoticed, meeting the needs that the state will not. Is this a flight from catastrophe into the private sphere, a 21st-century version of Voltaire’s il faut cultiver notre jardin? But Walter’s feminism is anchored in the city, in the marches and demonstrations she still regularly attends. “I’m not much of a hippy. I’m living quite a normal urban life. People see ecofeminism in a maybe more radical and hippy box than that, and I’d like to say no, this is for everyone.”

Walter’s feminism is alive to the cruelties that emerge when people compete for scarce resources. As a charity leader, she saw “such divisions between women, hardening borders, that dehumanisation that creeps into people’s rhetoric”. In the UK, where groups of black-clad, balaclava-wearing men have been gathering to block roads and demand Britain “stop the boats”, the sense of fracture is acute. The Left observes bitterly that when climate protesters – some of them elderly women – lay down in the street, they were put in jail: the men of the far right, on the other hand, have been allowed to disperse without being arrested.

Towards the end of the book, Walter recounts seeing on her phone images of “the body of a female fighter being thrown from a building” in north-east Syria, where she had visited a group of women planning a better future. She tries to apply the lessons she learnt there about female solidarity in London, too. “When I feel really lost about the way forward it’s often the women around me who keep me going,” she writes. None of them “only spend their time asking other people to do things… They use their own talents and courage, and put them to work.”

Hungary has never had such a good climate bill as the one it could have now if, improbably, its parliament were to adopt the draft written by civil society and put out for public consultation. The fate of this draft legislation – which, with minimal changes, could be of outstanding quality even by international standards – depends on the stance of the Tisza government. But how will Péter Magyar and his party proceed?

Last summer, the Hungarian constitutional court ruled that the climate law passed by Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz government – which liked to call itself a “champion of the climate” – was inadequate and unconstitutional. The court annulled part of the law, calling on the National Assembly to “remedy the breach of the Fundamental Law resulting from this failure” by June 2026.

Subsequently, the Fidesz government showed no interest whatsoever in the matter. But a regulatory proposal has been drawn up that is virtually ready for implementation and could even have ensured compliance with the deadline. This document was not drafted by any parliamentary group: it is the joint effort of more than 180 civil society and professional organisations, and the proposal currently under public debate is of a particularly high standard.

Built on solid principles…

One of the draft bill’s greatest strengths is that it treats mitigation (alleviating environmental harm), adaptation (adjusting to climate change), and resilience (increasing resistance) as objectives of equal importance. Unusually, the system of guiding principles is also sufficiently detailed: alongside traditional environmental law principles (precaution, the polluter pays, prevention), it also includes distinctly modern, progressive principles such as the “principle of sufficiency” (which focuses on well-being rather than maximum consumption, thereby limiting waste and the over-use of resources), a systems approach, data-driven decision-making, and proportionate individual responsibility. The fact that the prohibition on regression and intergenerational justice are linked to existing constitutional court case law indicates that the drafters of the text drew upon the few effective practices that Hungarian environmental protection has painstakingly developed over recent decades.

Particularly positive is the detailed and forward-looking approach to water management. The proposal entails the requirement to review bilateral water-sharing agreements, ensuring the public availability of groundwater monitoring data, and encourages the use of greywater. These are all elements that were previously absent from domestic legislation and would be indispensable to managing the water crisis Hungary now faces – the most tangible consequence of climate change in the Carpathian Basin.

The section on forest management is also very thorough: avoiding clearcutting, accounting for shifts in climate zones, and calling for support for species migration all point to a distinctly modern approach. Another positive aspect is the inclusion of the concepts and requirements relating to mental health and energy poverty in the cooling sector, which are absent from many otherwise modern European climate laws

The detailed description of the carbon budget mechanism (a legally binding, period-based planning and accounting framework that determines how much greenhouse gas we may emit in each period if we are serious about achieving net-zero emissions) is useful: together, the five-year rolling planning cycle, the carry-over option, the institution of infringement proceedings, and the obligation to submit final accounts form an enforceable system similar to the UK model. The requirement to introduce consumption-based emissions tracking is also welcome, as it can counterbalance the limitations of the territorial approach. The sectoral measures (building renovation, transport, industry, food consumption) are sufficiently wide-ranging and specific, whilst the establishment of an ecological hierarchy for biomass utilisation (modelled on the waste hierarchy) is particularly forward-looking.

One of the draft bill’s greatest strengths is that it treats mitigation, adaptation, and resilience as objectives of equal importance.

… and strong scientific foundations

The scientific and innovation elements of the concept are particularly strong: the Climate Innovation Centre, the National Climate Data Centre, and the introduction of funding mechanisms similar to Carbon Contracts for Difference initiatives to support emissions-reduction investments create promising institutional and financial instruments. Support for grassroots initiatives and recognition of traditional and community knowledge are also forward-looking and in line with the principle of subsidiarity. Moreover, the obligation to promote climate awareness at all levels of the education system, the development of teacher training, and measures to combat disinformation together form a coherent strategy for shaping public attitudes.

It seems useful to introduce ex-ante climate risk assessment as a separate legal institution to ensure that no government decision may be adopted without such an evaluation. Extending scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions (i.e. those related to purchased energy, on-site emissions, and arising from suppliers, respectively) to cover the entire value chain in environmental impact assessments is also a modern, ESG-compatible, and forward-looking rule.

Involving the Ombudsman for Future Generations in the ombudsman procedure in the event of a carbon budget overrun could also serve as a strong enforcement mechanism. A similar institution once existed, but the 2011 amendments to the Fundamental Law rendered it ineffective.

The enshrinement of the status of the Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Policy is clearly positive: it operates solely in accordance with the Hungarian constitution and the law and has its own budget and secretariat, and proposals relating to climate targets cannot be adopted without its opinion. The joint nomination mechanism of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA) and the Hungarian Research Network (HUN-REN) also provides a safeguard against political influence. The operation of the government Committee on Climate Protection under the prime minister’s leadership provides an appropriate framework for inter-ministerial coordination, whilst the mixed (partly non-political) composition of the National Climate Protection Council can strengthen its social legitimacy.

The introduction of the concept of “climate endangerment” into Hungarian law is particularly noteworthy: the public prosecutor could also bring proceedings against major emitters, seeking compensation and a ban on their activities, which represents a significant step forward in climate litigation. The privileged legal status of civil society organisations as claimants, their right to bring legal proceedings, and an exemption from litigation fees also provide a significant safeguard. The Advocate for Future Generations’ powers to intervene and to submit motions to the constitutional court are also commendable.

The introduction of the National Climate Protection Fund is a useful initiative, as it creates a dedicated and predictable funding framework (in contrast to current practice, namely ad hoc budgetary allocations and the routine deductions affecting them). The requirement for green corporate governance obligations and transition plans – particularly in light of the fact that these obligations have been substantially relaxed following the narrowing of the scope of the EU’s CSDDD Directive – is a forward-looking and courageous step. Meanwhile, excluding activities relating to fossil fuels from development bank financing is a clear and correct direction. Furthermore, enshrining participation principles in international climate finance would be fair (although, unfortunately, it seems unrealistic in this form).

Areas for improvement

As noted, Hungarian policymakers have never faced such a well-thought-out and complex climate regulation. That said, there are some minor shortcomings and contradictions, which the current public debate could identify and iron out.

Perhaps the most striking omission is the absence of any explicit reference to the institutional framework of climate justice, including climate litigation and state liability. This would be particularly important, as the “no backsliding” and “polluter pays” principles can only be effectively implemented if backed by a strong enforcement mechanism. It would also be worth incorporating a principle of climate equity, which specifies enhanced protection for socially vulnerable groups (the poor, the elderly, and those with a higher health risk), as they bear a disproportionately greater burden from the impacts of climate change.

It is difficult to understand the complete absence of any mention of the transport sector’s resilience in the proposal. For instance, the text could at least allude to infrastructure risks from heatwaves and extreme rainfall (roads, railways, bridges) and to preparing the vehicle fleet. In the transport section, there is also no discussion of aviation and inland waterway transport, even though their emissions are by no means negligible (although, for the time being, European climate legislation also often treats these as separate categories).

The objective of “phasing out harmful state subsidies by 2030” is correct in itself, but its feasibility is doubtful unless it is accompanied by a mandatory review schedule and a public list of the subsidies concerned. Regarding the management of the National Climate Protection Fund, it would be advisable to ensure its independence from political influence and to give civil society organisations a meaningful role in decision-making (rather than merely representing beneficiaries).

The current wording of the green public procurement requirement – “preference must be given” – is far too weak. To ensure effectiveness, a specific quota requirement or a time-bound obligation should be introduced. What is more, the text includes no provision regarding the responsibility of media actors and social media platforms in combating climate disinformation. In the case of the National Climate Protection Council, limiting membership to nine and granting a minister the role of co-chair pose a risk: despite the principles of proportional representation, government influence could become dominant, particularly if the minister’s department also covers the council’s operating costs. It would be advisable to limit the minister’s role to that of an observer or a non-voting chairperson, and to place the funding under the supervision of the National Assembly.

In the case of local authorities, the phrase “The state shall provide adequate budgetary support” is too general and leaves room for abuse. At the very least, the law should set a minimum funding guarantee or a clear allocation method; otherwise, authorities in smaller parts of the country will be unable to fulfil their statutory obligations due to a lack of resources. Rules on conflicts of interest and disclosure obligations for members are lacking as well, which could allow industry lobbyists to influence the decision-making process.

In addition, it would be advisable to establish a mandatory cooperation mechanism between the Scientific Council and the Ombudsman for Future Generations. Both bodies assess compliance with the carbon budget in parallel, and without coordination, overlapping or contradictory recommendations may arise.

The scope of the climate-threatening offence also appears to be narrow, as it applies only to major emitters subject to the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS), whilst medium-sized emitters – whose emissions are significant in aggregate – are excluded. To remedy this, the text should introduce a mechanism for gradual extension.

The possibility of bringing an action for failure to act in the event of a carbon budget shortfall is appropriate, but the provision includes no specific sanction if the government fails to comply even after losing the case, which substantially weakens its enforceability. Furthermore, legality oversight is a useful tool for local authority decisions, but the possibility of withholding funding could disproportionately affect smaller local authorities, which are already under-resourced. So,  it would be advisable to establish a graduated system of sanctions and an appeal mechanism.

That said, these are minor details, and there is still time to refine the bill. The more important question is whether, after its historic win, Péter Magyar’s government will have the will to do so – not just to perfect the legislation, but to put an end to the current unconstitutional situation in the first place.

The civil society document is ‘extremely thorough and wide-ranging, comparable to the most comprehensive legislation at European level’.

How will Tisza proceed?

“Experts are analysing the text of the civil society draft bill to assess what elements can be incorporated into the draft bill to be tabled by the government,” the press office of the Ministry of the Living Environment announced at the end of July.  According to the ministry, the civil society document is “extremely thorough and wide-ranging, comparable to the most comprehensive legislation at European level”. Meanwhile, legislators are also examining which elements should be regulated at statutory level, and which issues are better addressed in strategies or lower-level legislation.

According to the ministry’s position, bolder emission-reduction targets alone are not enough. “A framework must also be established setting out how these targets will be achieved, and what the roles of economic and social actors are in the transition towards sustainability.” The legislation must also address how the country can replace fossil fuels with renewables as well as how it can reduce energy consumption.

Notably, the ministry’s response suggests that Hungary’s new climate law will place much greater emphasis on adaptation than the current legislation. “Hungary is one of Europe’s most vulnerable countries to climate change,” the ministry pointed out. According to a previous ruling by the constitutional court, a legal framework must be established to ensure the preservation of the unique landscapes, wildlife, and natural assets of the Carpathian Basin. Accordingly, “The law must address in great detail adaptation to the inevitable effects of climate change and the development of flexible resilience to climate change.”

Forty years after the world’s worst man-made disaster at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, Belarus is aggressively expanding its nuclear ambitions, declaring its readiness to build a second plant. This effort is bankrolled and managed by Russia, which has already financed two reactors in Ostrovets and is now planning a third. But how did the nation that suffered most from the Chornobyl catastrophe come to embrace the “peaceful atom”, and why have anti-nuclear activists been unable to halt this trajectory?

The explosion at Chornobyl on 26 April 1986 left Belarus as the primary “target” of the radioactive plume. Due to prevailing winds in the disaster’s immediate aftermath, approximately 35 per cent of all caesium-137 fallout in Europe landed on Belarusian soil, despite the plant being located in Ukraine. 

The radiation forced the evacuation of 470 villages and towns. Some were literally buried – homes and farmstead buildings bulldozed into the earth to contain high doses of radiation. Estimates suggest that between 140,000 and 300,000 Belarusians left their homes forever; some fled voluntarily, while others were forcibly relocated by the state. 

Belarus was also forced to withdraw 2,640 square kilometres of agricultural land from use – an area larger than the territory of Luxembourg. Radiation contaminated over 20 per cent of the country’s farmland, permanently altering the economic structure of what was once a predominantly agrarian nation. A quarter of Belarusian forests absorbed dangerous radionuclides like a sponge, making the gathering of berries, mushrooms, and the use of firewood hazardous even four decades later. 

In the first decade following the disaster, Belarus faced an unprecedented surge in thyroid cancer, particularly in the Gomel and Brest regions. Cases among children skyrocketed tenfold – a direct consequence of the “iodine shock” caused by Soviet authorities concealing the disaster while people celebrated May Day outdoors. 

Nowadays, official data suggests that one in ten Belarusians – including 180,000 children – still lives in radioactive contamination zones. Their bodies are exposed daily to low doses of radiation through local food and the environment. 

Meanwhile, state propaganda has begun to “forget” Chornobyl, framing its consequences as a historical event that has been successfully overcome. Assistance programs have been curtailed, and benefits for “liquidators” (recovery workers) have been revoked. Today, Belarus is ploughing land once deemed contaminated, grazing livestock on it, and harvesting timber from radioactive forests for export. Official health statistics no longer link thyroid disease or oncology to the 1986 disaster. Belarusians are being told that radiation is no longer a threat – and may even be beneficial. Yet warnings can still be found between the lines of specialised journals, which, for instance, continue to advise fishermen on how to cook fish that may contain caesium-137. 

The Kremlin’s geopolitical leash  

Despite the collective trauma of Chornobyl, President Alexander Lukashenko decided to build Belarus’s first nuclear power plant in 2008. The regime marketed it as a cutting-edge, safe project that would grant Belarus energy independence and cheap electricity. 

Defying expectations, the site chosen for the nuclear power plant was not in the already contaminated zones, but Ostrovets, a pristine area near the border with Lithuania (an EU and NATO member). On clear days, the cooling towers of the Belarusian NPP (BelNPP) in Ostrovets are visible from Gediminas Hill in Vilnius. 

Lacking the technology and capital to complete the project independently, Lukashenko turned to Russia for a 10-billion-dollar loan. Predictably, the Russian state nuclear enterprise Rosatom became the general contractor. The construction was plagued by scandals: the first reactor vessel was dropped during installation, and the second was damaged during rail transport. Nevertheless, the plant was inaugurated in November 2020, timed to coincide with the anniversary of the October Revolution in typical Soviet fashion. 

At the ceremony, Lukashenko remarked: “A little time will pass, and we will fully realise what a feat we have accomplished with the support of our elder brothers… I’m only half-joking when I say that since we’ve learned how, we should build a second plant.” 

However, the following years were marked by technical failures and unscheduled shutdowns. Six years after its launch, experts note that the plant has failed to deliver cheaper energy; in fact, electricity prices in Belarus have risen. Furthermore, the country now faces the massive expense of building its own spent nuclear fuel storage. 

The structural mismatch in Belarus’s energy strategy became painfully clear in 2024. According to the energy ministry, fully absorbing the output of just two nuclear units would require an annual demand surge of 18.5 billion kWh. However, with domestic consumption growing by a mere 6 billion kWh over the last five years, the project has become a white elephant. To make BelNPP economically viable, the country would need to consume in a single year what the plant has cumulatively generated over the past five. 

As a result, Belarus has effectively been placed on a 10-billion-dollar geopolitical leash. “Energy is the backbone of the economy, and in this, we are dependent on Russia,” notes Irina Sukhiy, an anti-nuclear activist and expert with the Green Belarus Alliance, which brings together Belarusian NGOs, experts, local communities, and activists. “If our eastern neighbours choose, they can cut off gas or stop supplying nuclear fuel.” 

Vanishing hopes for еxport 

In February 2025, the three Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia) officially decoupled from the BRELL grid (connecting Belarus, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) and began dismantling infrastructure on their borders with Belarus and with Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave. 

“We no longer have ties with Russia and Belarus; the energy system is in our hands,” declared Lithuanian Energy Minister Žygimantas Vaičiūnas. This synchronisation with continental Europe, accelerated by Russia’s war in Ukraine, dealt a serious blow to Minsk’s export ambitions. Lithuania, once the primary hub for Belarusian electricity, has not only closed its borders but also legally banned the purchase of energy from Ostrovets. 

A year before, Lithuania’s nuclear power safety regulator, VATESI, had issued a formal demand to the Belarusian Ministry of Emergency Situations, insisting that the BelNPP halt operations until all outstanding safety concerns are fully addressed. VATESI underscored that since the project’s inception, Minsk has prioritised rapid construction and commissioning over rigorous quality control – a particularly alarming strategy for a facility located a mere 40 kilometres from the Lithuanian capital. “This irresponsible approach is increasingly manifested in frequent unplanned shutdowns and power fluctuations,” the regulator noted, suggesting that such systemic instabilities were likely overlooked or ignored during the critical construction and installation phases. 

Beyond technical failures, VATESI accused the Belarusian regime of systemic opacity. The regulator claimed that Minsk consistently conceals critical data regarding BelNPP’s unstable performance, emergency scrams, and protracted maintenance periods. Rather than accepting vague official explanations, the Lithuanian authorities are now demanding full disclosure on radionuclide emission limits, the publication of all international expert mission recommendations, and transparent reports on their implementation. Such data, the regulator insists, is indispensable for the accurate modelling and forecasting of potential radioactive releases in the event of a major accident. 

Meanwhile, Minsk shows no signs of slowing its nuclear expansion. Following the 2023 commissioning of the second unit at the Ostrovets plant, the regime signalled a further push in 2025 with plans for a third reactor. According to Energy Minister Denis Moroz, this new unit is slated for operation between 2035 and 2038. This trajectory has drawn a sharp rebuke from Vilnius. Lithuanian presidential adviser Deividas Matulionis said that the third unit represents a qualitative leap in the regional threat level. He warned that, while the first two reactors were already a source of deep concern, a further expansion would pose an even more formidable security challenge. 

According to Evgeny Makarchuk, an energy security specialist at the International Strategic Action Network for Security, this stance has deprived Belarus of access to the Nord Pool power exchange market. Under different political conditions, Belarus could export up to 2.1 billion kWh per year, generating revenue of 230 million euros. Instead, the BelNPP generates a huge surplus of electricity with nowhere to sell. Ukraine is closed due to the war, and Poland maintains a strict sanctions regime. While this surplus could theoretically flow eastward, Russia itself suffers from excess capacity and has no need for Belarusian kilowatts at market prices.  

“Strategic isolation has effectively turned Belarus into an energy island,” notes Sukhiy. The Ostrovets plant was originally conceived as a profitable route to Western markets, but the collapse of the BRELL network has turned it into a structural dead end. Instead of a bridge to Europe, the plant now functions as an isolated asset, operating solely within the Kremlin’s broader energy and political manoeuvres. 

Tightening control 

Technical incidents at the Ostrovets plant have sparked concern in Europe about whether Minsk has learned the lessons of Chernobyl. The regime’s secrecy and the lack of independent monitoring only exacerbate the atmosphere of persistent mistrust between Belarus and its neighbours. 

The tension further increased at the end of 2025, when the Russian defence ministry announced the deployment of the nuclear-capable hypersonic Oreshnik missile system in Belarus. Lukashenko presented the move as a means to ensure Belarus’s security.  

According to Lithuania’s national security threat assessment, the BelNPP has now become the central element of the regional threat. By deploying the Oreshnik missile system and tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, the Kremlin has effectively blurred the lines between civilian energy production and aggressive military strategy. Lithuanian intelligence emphasises that the persistent lack of transparency regarding the plant’s operations and the proposed expansion of the facility are being used as psychological leverage against Vilnius. 

Beyond the safety concerns, officials view Russia’s state-owned giant, Rosatom, as a tool of geopolitical influence.  

Belarus has effectively been placed on a 10-billion-dollar geopolitical leash.

The (r)evolution that never happened 

Today, the BelNPP has become a monument to Belarus’s authoritarian regime. Dmitry Kuchuk, an environmental policy advisor to exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, believes this is a problem the future must solve. “You can’t just flip a switch and close it immediately. We will need a serious audit of the plant’s condition and safety before deciding its fate,” he says. As the former head of the Belarusian Green Party, Kuchuk personally advocates for the plant’s closure: “The sooner the better for the budget and the country’s development”. 

However, the Belarusian government has turned a deaf ear to the warnings of experts and environmental activists. “Belarusians are categorically opposed to nuclear power, and it must be understood that the decision to build the NPP was made by Lukashenko alone. He ignored even his own Academy of Sciences, whose experts argued that the country simply did not need such a plant and that existing capacities were sufficient,” says Kuchuk. 

Belarusian authorities did initially signal a pivot towards renewable energy development. In 2010, the country passed a law on renewable energy sources (RES), which aimed to incentivise producers and provide tax breaks. However, the subsequent pivot toward nuclear energy effectively brought the development of renewables to a standstill.  

In 2018, a study titled “Energy [r]evolution”, supported by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, showed that Belarus had the potential to reach 92 per cent renewable energy by 2050. The report examined two distinct scenarios. The first was based on existing state strategies, which prioritised natural gas and the expansion of nuclear power. The second was a “revolutionary” scenario focused on the aggressive development of solar and wind energy. “Our research demonstrated that Belarus possesses enough potential to transition to 92 per cent renewable energy by 2050. And that was based on technology available back in 2018,” says Sukhiy from the Green Belarus Alliance. “Naturally, such a transition requires significant upfront investment. However, these calculations show that, in the long term, this path is more economically viable than the scenario chosen by the state.” 

It is symbolic that Belarus’s first wind turbine – a 250-kilowatt Nordex unit standing 50 meters tall – appeared in 2000 as part of a project to assist those resettled from the Chernobyl zone. It was installed near the village of Stakhoutsy, close to Lake Narach in the country’s most pristine region. By road, it stands just 60 kilometres from the BelNPP – and even closer as the crow flies. 

Path to a green future 

Belarusian civil society, now largely operating from abroad, is rethinking national and regional security through the prism of energy. “It’s impossible to build a free state if its ‘energy heart’ runs on foreign fuel, is serviced by foreign specialists, and is burdened with foreign debt,” proclaims Sukhiy. 

“By creating a vision of a green Belarus and working on a green transition, we are laying the foundation for Belarus’s independence, reducing its critical dependence on Russian energy resources, and ensuring that Belarus becomes a modern country rather than remaining stuck in the past,” she adds.  

Central and Eastern Europe’s post-communist history suggests that during any democratic transition, Moscow might attempt to crush reforms by “turning off the tap”. In 2006, after the “Orange Revolution” brought a pro-Western government to power in Ukraine, tensions between Moscow and Kyiv escalated. Russia’s Gazprom cut off gas supplies to Ukraine following a dispute over pricing and debt. Another incident occurred in 2009, when Russia stopped all gas flows through Ukraine to Europe.  

In Moldova, after pro-European forces came to power in 2020-2021, Russia sharply increased gas prices, forcing Chișinău to seek new suppliers, including those in Romania and other EU countries. This crisis was a clear instrument of political pressure. 

However, according to energy security expert Makarchuk, “this does not mean that the future is predetermined. Crises occur where there is a lack of preparedness. If we start acting now, the consequences can be mitigated, and disasters for the people and the economy can be avoided.” 

To achieve this, Belarus will have to make a series of critical strategic decisions in the very first hours of its genuine independence from the Kremlin. The diversification of the energy market and a departure from total reliance on Russian energy sources must become a prerequisite for any future democratic transition. 

“Technically, I see opportunities to completely break our dependence on Russia. We have our own oil refineries capable of processing up to 24 million tons of oil, while our domestic market requires only six million tons. We have assessed our oil import capacity: approximately 1.5 million tons can be obtained from Lithuania and about two million from Poland. All of this can be processed to produce gasoline, diesel fuel, and fuel oil. Furthermore, crude oil and petroleum products can be imported by rail,” Makarchuk notes. 

Ultimately, securing Belarus’s sovereign future depends on sustained solidarity and strategic cooperation among its neighbours. This path cannot be taken in isolation; it requires coordinated regional efforts and strong support from the broader European community to transform Belarus’s energy independence from a national dream into a pillar of European security. 

This will be difficult, given that Belarus has sided with Russia, distancing itself from and alienating its neighbours. However, experts will not insist on a green transition for Belarus.“The assertion that Belarus cannot exist without Russian oil and gas is not entirely accurate. Yes, the stakes are high: in 2023, the gap between preferential prices for Russian gas and global market prices was 4.2 billion dollars. However, with sound policy, careful preparation, and supply diversification, the crisis can be overcome. It need not be a catastrophe for the Belarusian people,” Makarchuk adds. 

As for the Ostrovets power plant, experts agree that its presence during Belarus’s transformation will help balance the country’s energy system. However, in the long term, Belarus can meet its energy needs without the plant, especially given the country’s strong potential to develop renewable energy sources. Whether the political will for such a major change exists, however, is another question.  

Solar geoengineering is no silver bullet against the climate crisis, but rejecting it categorically in the name of preserving the planet overlooks our entanglement with the atmosphere. Drawing on feminist neo-materialism, Anni Pokela proposes a different approach: purposeful, accountable participation in atmospheric becoming from within the relationship.

“It surrounds us, penetrates us, and we are barely aware of it.” As philosopher Emanuele Coccia writes in The Life of Plants (2018), the atmosphere is our first world – “the sphere of breath, the medium in which everything that lives is wholly immersed.” And it is changing at an accelerating pace.

The latest assessment by climate scientist James Hansen and colleagues shows that the pace of global warming has accelerated from 0.18 to 0.27 degrees Celsius per decade – over 50 per cent faster than the average between 1970 and 2010. The researchers estimate that we will cross the 2-degree threshold by 2045.

In this context, it makes sense that a growing number of actors have begun considering emergency measures such as solar radiation geoengineering: the idea of deliberately injecting reflective particles into the stratosphere to cool the planet by deflecting some of the Sun’s radiation back into space.

For many environmentalists and ecofeminists, the very concept is an affront: a masculinist, technocratic fantasy that treats the Earth as a machine to be tuned rather than a living system to be respected. The instinct is often to reject it categorically.

I understand that instinct, because I have felt it myself. But I have come to believe that categorical rejection is neither the most responsible nor the most fruitful position available to us.

The debate as it stands

Solar radiation modification (SRM), most commonly discussed in the form of stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), has been modelled and theorised for over 50 years. The idea is inspired by what volcanoes do naturally: when Mount Tambora, on the island of Sumbawa in present-day Indonesia, erupted in 1815, the massive cloud of particles it released cooled the global climate by roughly one degree Celsius for years. SAI would attempt something similar by design – aircraft or high-altitude balloons releasing reflective particles into the stratosphere to create a partial sunshade – only with less sulfur, or even potentially a less toxic, more bio-based particle.

SRM does not remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and it does not address the root cause of climate change. It is, at best, a temporary response that could buy time while the deeper, structural work of decarbonisation continues. Yet, the attention it receives is growing, driven by an uncomfortable reality: we are running out of that very time.

In ecofeminist circles, geoengineering has been met with powerful and, in many ways, justified resistance.

Despite this growing interest, there is currently no international framework governing SRM research or deployment. No large-scale field experiments are underway, and the research remains dominated by climate modelling in Global North institutions. Additionally, private actors such as the startup Stardust Solutions are taking the lead, raising questions about public oversight and accountability. And this is precisely the problem: the conversation about whether and how to investigate these technologies is happening without most of the world at the table. As the UN Environment Programme’s Expert Panel has stressed, there needs to be significantly more research into the potential impacts of SRM on communities already on the frontlines of climate change.

The feminist refusal

Within environmental thought, and particularly in ecofeminist circles, geoengineering has been met with powerful and, in many ways, justified resistance. Although SRM would be, at best, a complementary solution to decarbonisation, environmentalists have raised significant concerns about it being used as an argument to delay the more systemic transition away from fossil fuels and overconsumption.

Meanwhile, feminist scholars have exposed the masculinist, techno-scientific culture that permeates the field: the dominance of male-led research teams from the Global North, the privileging of quantitative methods over qualitative or community-based knowledge, and the deployment of fatalistic narratives that frame SRM as an inevitable necessity or a “neutral” silver bullet.

The Hands Off Mother Earth Alliance, a coalition of civil society groups and feminist advocates, has articulated perhaps the most forceful collective opposition to geoengineering, calling it a perpetuation of the unjust industrial model that caused the climate crisis in the first place. Ecofeminist voices often invoke the Mother Earth metaphor to insist on the planet’s intrinsic worth and resist its instrumentalisation. These critiques rightly expose that geoengineering is not a neutral technical question but is fundamentally about values, power, and whose knowledge counts.

Yet, these critiques have three recurring limitations.

First, they tend to conflate the problematic ideologies behind geoengineering discourse with the technological mechanics themselves. The fact that current research culture is steeped in masculinist assumptions does not mean that the physics of SAI’s aerosol-radiation interactions are inherently patriarchal. The essentialist language that portrays SRM mechanics themselves as a hubristic, sometimes even phallistic, penetration into the natural system misses this important distinction. If the background assumptions were different – if the researchers, the questions, the governance, the values were different – would the critique remain the same?

Second, some critiques contain an inconsistency. They call for recognising our deep interconnection with the natural world while simultaneously treating atmospheric technology as something categorically external to it – as if restoring a local wetland were a relational act but reflecting sunlight were an alien violation. Some of the imagery used in anti-geoengineering advocacy conveys the idea that these technologies are comparable to a planet-sized wrench threatening to tinker with nature. This implicitly reinstates the nature-culture binary that feminist theory has spent decades trying to dismantle. If we truly are interconnectedly one with Mother Earth, how can we sustainably position technology as an inherent outsider to this configuration?

Third, there is a problem of scale. Feminist environmental thought has long prioritised local, situated, community-based knowledge and action – and rightly so. But when it comes to planetary atmospheric physics, localism alone cannot resolve the challenge. The atmosphere does not respect these boundaries. A farmer’s methane emissions in Finland and a monsoon system in South Asia are entangled in the same global climate. The exclusive emphasis on small-scale solutions, while morally appealing, risks proving inadequate at the planetary scale, where some of the most urgent decisions must be made.

A different way in

This is where feminist new materialism opens a different door – not to uncritical endorsement of geoengineering, but to a more honest and fruitful engagement with it.

The work of physicist and philosopher Karen River Barad, whose theory of agential realism is foundational to new materialist thought, offers tools for rethinking the relationship between humans, technology, and the atmosphere. Barad’s central concept is intra-action: the idea that distinct entities do not exist prior to their relations but emerge through them. Where conventional thinking assumes that separate entities – a particle, an atmosphere, and a research team, for example – come together and interact, Barad argues that they only come into being through their entanglement.

The question is not whether we participate in shaping the atmosphere but how.

Applied to SAI, this reframing is profound. The atmosphere is not a passive container waiting to receive aerosol particles or not, nor are those particles inert tools wielded by human controllers. What SAI would constitute, from a Baradian perspective, is a phenomenon – an ongoing material-discursive entanglement in which human decision-making, particle chemistry, stratospheric wind patterns, solar radiation, and surface ecosystems all participate agentially. The cooling effect does not simply happen to the atmosphere; it emerges through the specific configuration of all these entangled agencies.

This reframing does two critical things. First, it dissolves the comfortable binary between a “natural” atmosphere and an “engineered” one. Second, it dismantles the hubristic mindset that we could ever have complete control over the atmosphere. Both stances – protecting a pure system and seizing control of it – are revealed to be ontologically unsustainable.

Industrial emissions, shipping pollution and agricultural practices, to name a few, have been modifying the atmosphere for centuries. Climate scientist James Hansen himself has noted that the reduction of sulphur in shipping fuel – a clean air policy – inadvertently removed a cooling effect equivalent to what SAI proposes to create. In a real, material sense, we are not standing outside the atmosphere wondering whether to intervene. We are already geoengineering the planet. The question, therefore, is not whether we participate in shaping the atmosphere but how.

From intervention to intra-vention

Based on these considerations, I propose to replace the concept of “climate intervention”, which is conventionally used to describe geoengineering techniques, with the idea of climate intra-vention. Where intervention signals a procedure performed from the outside (an actor imposing change on a passive system) intra-vention designates something different: purposeful, accountable participation in atmospheric becoming from within the relationship.

This is not a semantic trick. The shift in framing would carry real consequences for how research is designed and governed. If SAI is understood as intra-action rather than intervention, then the models, metrics, and governance structures used in research are not neutral instruments of observation, but actively shape what the atmosphere becomes and what counts as relevant knowledge about it. Current SAI modelling, for instance, tends to prioritise global mean temperature as its primary metric. This makes temperature change visible and determinate while rendering other effects – regional precipitation shifts, monsoon stability, agricultural impacts – less prominent.

Different research practices would literally produce different phenomena. A modelling apparatus that centred, say, monsoon system stability or the lived experiences of communities in the Sahel, would not simply see SAI differently; it would literally bring a different version of SAI into being, with different boundaries, different risks, and different possibilities. This is what Barad means when they say that apparatuses are not static setups but are perpetually open to rearrangement. A patriarchal, technocratic configuration of SAI research is not the only possible one.

This is where feminist engagement with geoengineering becomes not just possible but urgently necessary. If how we set up SAI research actively produces what SAI is, then the values, perspectives, and power relations embedded in that setup matter enormously. Feminist principles of justice, care, transparency, and participatory knowledge production are not peripheral add-ons to the “real science”. They are constitutive of the science itself.

Care, not control

As climate impacts accelerate, interest in SRM technologies will only grow – whether feminists are at the table or not. If the field is abandoned to technocratic elites and private actors, the very outcomes that feminist critics most fear become more likely: unilateral deployment driven by profit, governance captured by powerful states, communities – particularly in the Global South – excluded from decisions that will reshape their climate.

The concerned scientists who launched the Solar Geoengineering Non-Use Agreement in 2022 called for immediate political action to prevent the “normalisation” of solar geoengineering as a climate policy option, arguing that it is neither necessary, desirable, nor governable in the current context. But as others have pointed out, if publicly funded, transparent research is banned, the field does not disappear. It simply moves into clandestine, unmonitored, private hands.

Feminist engagement with SAI can be understood as an act of care rather than an endorsement of control. Care, in the sense that feminist philosopher María Puig de la Bellacasa articulates it, is not about fixing or mastering but about attending to neglected realities, staying with troubling situations, and taking responsibility for the entanglements we are already part of. This means approaching SRM deliberation as a form of responsibility toward the communities already experiencing unbearable heat, failing harvests, and collapsing ecosystems; insisting that research is designed with justice at its centre, and that Indigenous communities, researchers in the Global South, and grassroots actors are not consulted after the fact but participate in shaping what research is prioritised, what SRM is understood to be and how that research looks like in practice.

Staying with the trouble

This framework does not solve all tensions. Most SRM research is still funded and governed by powerful institutions in the Global North, and profit motives, geopolitical competition, and blind techno-optimism are real forces in this space. There is a risk that the language of “intra-vention” and “care” could be co-opted to entrench business as usual.

Categorical rejection is not abstention. It is an act that excludes certain possibilities while enabling others.

There is also a temporal dilemma. Climate urgency is used to justify accelerating SRM research now, within existing structures, before the systemic transformation that justice demands has been achieved. But if we rush ahead, we risk consolidating the very systems that caused the crisis. On the other hand, if we wait for post-growth institutions and decolonial governance to emerge fully before investigating SRM, we may face tipping points that foreclose the possibility of such transformations.

There is no neat resolution to these contradictions. But holding these perspectives simultaneously is more honest and more productive than pretending they do not exist. Donna Haraway calls this “staying with the trouble”: refusing both the seductions of despair and the false comforts of easy answers.

What Barad’s philosophy adds is the insight that inaction is not a neutral zero position. In a world where the atmosphere is already being reshaped by human activity, choosing not to investigate how it might be reshaped more deliberately is itself a form of participation in atmospheric becoming, with its own consequences and its own accountabilities. Categorical rejection is not abstention. It is an act that excludes certain possibilities while enabling others – and we are responsible for those exclusions.

Historically, feminist thought has been at its most powerful when it has refused purity. When it has held contradictions, and when it has insisted on staying engaged with messy, compromised realities rather than retreating to the moral high ground. The atmosphere – this all-encompassing fluid that we breathe, that we are reshaping, that is reshaping us – demands nothing less.

As part of its strategy to “diversify” energy supplies, the European Union has increasingly replaced its addiction to Russian fossil fuels with a reliance on American liquefied natural gas. Europe already depends on the US for more than half its LNG imports, and the share is expected to reach up to 80 per cent by the end of the decade. In the Gulf Coast area of the US, this gas craze is fuelling a new wave of infrastructure construction and extraction, threatening fragile ecosystems and endangering residents.

On the stretch of US coastline along the Gulf of Mexico between Texas and Louisiana, there stand some of the most important terminals for the export of liquefied natural gas (LNG). Several LNG export plants are currently undergoing expansion, while at least five major new terminals are under construction and others are in advanced planning stages. Here, Donald Trump’s “Drill, baby drill!” slogan is being put into action, transforming the natural landscape and the lives of its inhabitants.

Extracting more oil – and the associated gas that sits over it – means not only focusing on increasing domestic consumption of fossil fuels, but also allocating a large portion of production to international markets. In particular, the European market, which has reduced its reliance on Russian fossil fuels since 2022.

For this reason, the Gulf Coast area (which Trump renamed “Gulf of America”) – already home to one of the largest concentrations of oil, gas, and petrochemical infrastructure in the United States – is now being further industrialised with new LNG facilities. The LNG is then loaded onto giant ships that travel around the world.

The politics of extraction

Cameron Parish, on the south-western coast of Louisiana, is one of the places where the LNG expansion is most concentrated, both in industrial terms and in terms of impact. The fossil craze invades an area of wetlands, canals, and coastal communities already exposed to erosion, hurricanes, and decades of previous extraction. With a capacity of approximately 10 million tonnes per annum (MTPA) of LNG, the Calcasieu Pass terminal is operational, but a few hundred metres away, dozens of cranes testify that work has already begun on Calcasieu Pass 2 (CP2), a 28-billion-dollar mega-project.

Both terminals belong to Venture Global, a company with close ties to the current US president. It is the same company with which Italian energy giant Eni signed a contract in July 2025 to purchase 2 million tonnes of gas per year for the next 20 years. This has pleased both Donald Trump and Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister.

Venture Global’s growth has been closely aligned with the expansion of LNG exports promoted under the Trump administration, and the company is among those that have benefited from accelerated approval processes and a more lenient regulatory framework. This political dimension came under scrutiny in a recent investigation by The Guardian, which raised serious questions about the relationship between company executives, politicians, and financial markets. According to the report, Venture Global co-founders Michael Sabel and Robert Pender purchased millions of shares in their own company a few days after meetings with senior Trump administration officials and immediately before the release of key authorisations for LNG expansion, including the Calcasieu Pass 2 project. The Democrats have also launched a Senate inquiry into the matter.

Construction timelines for CP2 are remarkably short: only 29 months. Construction is expected to employ up to around 7,500 workers at peak, before the workforce drops to just a few hundred once the plant becomes operational. “There are a lot of migrants, but we have never noticed a real ICE presence here,” says James Hiatt, founder and spokesperson for For a Better Bayou, a grassroots organisation that seeks to oppose the expansion of LNG terminals by any means, including legal action. In fact, the local group succeeded in stopping the project during the Biden administration, but everything changed with the new political priorities of the White House.

Cameron Parish has historically based its economy on fishing, aquaculture, and shellfish farming. During a field trip in the Gulf Coast area in February, I crossed the water basin next to the two Calcasieu terminals on a boat, with flocks of pelicans flying overhead. Our guide is Sky Leger, a fisherman who tells us that he is now one of the last active fishers in the area. When work began on the new terminal, he says, huge amounts of mud destroyed thousands of oysters, the pride of this region. The impact on the area’s many dolphins is still to be seen.

For residents, the expansion of the LNG plants means living with high-risk facilities where accidents are a regular occurrence. The latest one happened just a couple of days before my arrival. A natural gas pipeline linked to an LNG project exploded near Holly Beach, injuring a worker during what was described as routine maintenance operations. Holly Beach itself is a narrow strip of coastline dotted with stilt houses built to withstand flooding – a necessity in a region repeatedly hit by major hurricanes, including Rita and Ike in 2008, and Laura and Delta in 2020, as residents are reminded by markers still visible on trees.

For residents, the expansion of the LNG plants means living with high-risk facilities where accidents are a regular occurrence.

Gas slated for shipment to Europe and Asia arrives in Cameron Parish from the arid plains of the Permian Basin, about 1,000 kilometres further north. However, oil remains the undisputed king in this windswept area of Texas. According to the latest official data for 2024, six million barrels are produced here per day, more than any other field in the world. The more oil is extracted, the more associated gas is produced and must be sent away, with Europe being a key destination. But the reality suggests that Europe doesn’t really need all this gas. Instead, it is doing a favour to its fickle ally across the Atlantic, while promoting the interests of the “usual suspects”.

In Italy, for example, according to 2024 data, the annual gas demand was approximately 61.8 billion cubic metres – a significant decrease of around 20 per cent compared to 2021. In the same year, LNG imports into Italy amounted to 14.7 billion cubic metres, down from 16.5 billion in 2023. LNG therefore accounted for about a quarter of total gas imports. According to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, this share could grow significantly by 2030: between 75 and 80 per cent of LNG imported into Europe could come from the United States – meaning Europe may shift from dependence on Russian gas to reliance on American gas.

Travelling across the immense Permian Basin is disorienting. Wells and extraction-related infrastructure are everywhere, with some even located mere metres from residential areas.

A growing wasteland

It is no coincidence that when you land in Midland – which together with neighbouring Odessa forms the main conurbation of the Permian Basin – flares burning excess gas are visible on the horizon. “Paradoxically, it is less serious that there is flaring visible to the naked eye than hidden methane emissions,” explains Sharon Wilson of the local organisation Oilfield Witness. For decades, Wilson has been tirelessly mapping pollution levels in this area. She identifies the hidden emissions with an optical gas imaging camera, revealing massive discharge escaping from the energy infrastructure.

In reality, flaring is not legal either, but regulatory enforcement allows for certain thresholds that oil and gas companies – not closely monitored by local authorities – tend to exploit. Wilson notes that even in this area, ICE does not seem too interested in controlling the local workforce, most of whom are of Latin American origin.

Travelling across the immense Permian Basin is disorienting. Wells and extraction-related infrastructure are everywhere, with some – such as Pavilion Park in Midland – even located mere metres from residential areas. Across dozens of kilometres of land, there is little sign of the once-ample fertile farms, except for a few hectares of cotton fields stricken by the abnormal cold spell that hit the area a few days before my arrival. Like the emissions revealed by Wilson’s thermal camera, the tangle of underground pipes connecting the wells to the processing facilities is invisible to the naked eye. They form an immense web, marked here and there by signs: “Warning, this gas may be toxic.”

At times, the air is difficult to breathe, but nowhere more so than near Lake Boehmer, a reservoir formed by wastewater from oil processing located about an hour and a half’s drive from Midland. The area appears devoid of life, both within and around the basin. In some sections, the water bubbles unnaturally, giving the lake a disturbing, almost volatile appearance. Measurements indicate elevated levels of naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORM), a byproduct of oil and gas extraction that can accumulate in wastewater and residues.

A few kilometres from Lake Boehmer, there is an even more extensive tangle of pipes and facilities. This is the Waha Hub, the trading point for West Texas gas. In 2024, gas prices at Waha fell below zero for a significant portion of the year because production exceeded the capacity of the pipelines to carry gas out of the basin. At various times, producers faced negative pricing conditions, effectively paying to offload excess gas in order to continue oil extraction.

The final stop on my tour of this immense sacrifice zone is a deeply dystopian motorway service station: in front of the petrol station stands a 20-metre-high replica of a corn stalk. Inside, they sell caps with the words “Oil Field Mafia”, where the Italian term clearly has a positive connotation. Who knows if Trump has one in his own collection of caps?

Europe’s footprint

One European country that has been heavily involved with the US LNG industry is Italy. According to energy giant Snam, approximately 150 shipments arrived in Italy in 2024, with about one-third of the volume originating in the United States (another third came from Qatar, a quarter from Algeria, and the rest from other countries). In 2025, with the launch of the Ravenna floating storage and regasification unit (FSRU) – which brought Italy’s total regasification capacity to approximately 28 billion cubic metres per year – the pace of shipments remained high: a Snam press release dated 12 June 2025 states that 95 LNG shipments had already arrived in Italy since January 2025, “mainly” from the United States, Qatar, and Algeria.

But Italian involvement goes further than just purchasing gas. Large and expensive infrastructure, such as the terminals dotting the coasts of Texas and Louisiana, requires billions of dollars to build and maintain. It is no surprise that the bank Intesa Sanpaolo, whose financing for coal, oil and gas stood at 11 billion US dollars in 2024, has stepped in.

In 2024, the Turin-based credit institution financed the US gas company Cheniere with 158 million dollars. A year earlier, Intesa Sanpaolo’s gas investments had reached a record 1.3 billion dollars, most of which went to US-based company NextDecade for the development of the Rio Grande LNG terminal in Texas. Investments updated in January 2024 show 1.1 billion dollars allocated by Intesa to the development of LNG terminals. According to an analysis carried out by the French NGO Reclaim Finance, Intesa Sanpaolo contributed approximately 3.8 billion dollars to financing LNG expansion between 2021 and 2023, making it the leading Italian bank involved. In addition to Rio Grande, it supported the construction of five other terminals.

Energy company Edison is also playing a major role as one of the first European buyers of LNG from Venture Global LNG, with a 20-year contract to purchase approximately 1.4 billion cubic metres annually from the Calcasieu Pass facility. However, technical delays at the terminal and the prolonged commissioning phase – a transitional stage before full commercial operations – led Edison, along with other major international customers, to initiate international arbitration proceedings against the US company for failure to meet delivery obligations. It was not until May 2025 that Edison received its first LNG cargo under the contract, later unloaded at the regasification terminal at the port of Piombino, Tuscany. The disputes involving Edison are part of a broader legal conflict that also includes energy giants like the Spanish Repsol, the Dutch Shell, and the British BP, and centre on Venture Global’s decision to sell LNG on the spot market during the commissioning phase instead of supplying long-term contracted buyers.

As these companies pursue their lawsuits, the Permian Basin and the Gulf Coast continue to bear the social and environmental impacts of relentless extraction. Their suffering, however, is often drowned out by the noise of mega-deals and endless drilling.

This report draws on a field visit to the United States conducted by the Italian non-profit association ReCommon between January and February 2026. The author of this article, Luca Manes, is in charge of ReCommon’s media relations and communications.

As the energy transition gathers pace, fault lines are emerging within the environmental movement between those who prioritise the rapid deployment of large-scale green infrastructure and those who emphasise local participation. With shifting political priorities at the European level, could these conflicts contribute to a fairer transition rather than slowing it down?

Until recently, a cautious consensus dominated energy politics in the Western world: broadly protective of the fossil status quo, yet nominally committed to decarbonisation. That consensus has now fractured, and energy policy is being increasingly shaped by open conflict. Political actors aligned with fossil interests are becoming more explicit in their opposition to the energy transition, a shift visible in growing resistance to renewable projects and electrification. In the EU, anti-renewables rhetoric is gaining ground, particularly on the far right, where wind and solar are framed as economically damaging, imposed from above, and detached from people’s “real” needs.

Yet the rapid expansion of renewables is not only clashing with fossil fuel interests. It is also generating conflict among actors who, in principle, all support a green transition. At local and regional levels, environmental organisations have mobilised against specific transition-related projects. For example, in southern France, groups such as France Nature Environnement and the Ligue pour la Protection des Oiseaux have taken legal action against wind farms linked to the deaths of protected bird species in conservation areas. In southern Spain, Ecologistas en Acción campaigned against a large solar plant, arguing that it would degrade soils and disrupt local flora.

These disputes are not straightforward cases of environmental justice or NIMBYism, although they can overlap with both. They are better understood as “green-on-green” conflicts: clashes between competing ecological priorities, where actors share broad commitments to decarbonisation and environmental protection but disagree over what should be built, where, at what cost, and under whose authority. Given their increasing visibility and political implications, these conflicts deserve to be explored on their own terms, which this article attempts to do.

Competing priorities

The term “green-on-green conflicts” was coined in 2004 by the British geographer Charles Warren, drawing on the military expression “blue-on-blue”, meaning friendly fire. Warren used the term to suggest that such conflicts might foreshadow future environmental debates: “society has gone green, but what kind of green do we want?” Such conflicts often centre on siting decisions, species protection, and planning procedures. But they are also political in a broader sense, raising questions about who defines the public interest in the transition and what counts as acceptable damage.

Green-on-green conflicts are not new. They reflect long-standing tensions within environmentalism itself, particularly between actors who prioritise different dimensions of the ecological crisis. Most commonly in recent decades, one strand has placed climate mitigation at the centre, favouring rapid, system-wide transformation through engagement with governments and industry, and the development of large-scale infrastructure. Another is rooted in local or regional contexts and emphasises biodiversity, land use, and resource protection. While this distinction should not be overstated, many green-on-green disputes do follow this pattern, reflecting a persistent clash between different political cultures within the environmental movement.

Although opposition to renewable energy projects is often entangled with other grievances, conflicts between environmental actors deserve attention in their own right. In the EU, the acceleration of the energy transition over the past decade has made these conflicts more frequent and visible. Each of these conflicts is rooted in specific local issues that do not always translate neatly into a broader picture, yet their recurrence across Europe points to a common logic. Whereas Europe’s fossil energy system relies largely on distant extraction and concentrated infrastructure, the green transition depends on more spatially extensive and locally embedded forms of energy production, bringing energy systems into closer contact with territories.

Energy transition projects are usually framed as a common story in which decarbonisation is urgent, energy security is fragile, and energy sovereignty is essential. Opposition, however, rarely follows a single script. It tends to be more fragmented and situational, shaped by the details of individual projects and their local consequences. Even so, for all its variety, different energy sectors tend to generate different kinds of protests, rooted in their specific environmental impacts.

Sites of contention

Wind power, which accounts for roughly 40 per cent of renewable electricity generation in the EU, is the most common and widely discussed source of green-on-green conflict. One reason is its visibility. Onshore wind farms reshape landscapes and local environments, bringing them into direct contact with long-standing forms of resistance to large infrastructure projects.

Galicia in northwestern Spain illustrates the point. Once the country’s leading producer of wind power, the region has seen the expansion of onshore wind become a source of conflict. There, environmental groups opposed dozens of new onshore wind farms, filing hundreds of lawsuits and arguing that the rapid build-out was damaging landscapes and protected habitats. Many projects were temporarily paralysed as a result, sparking a wider public debate. The campaign did not reject wind power as such, which activists described as “essential to protect the planet in the face of the current climate crisis”. Instead, it targeted what the activists called a “speculative and predatory model” of large-scale wind power, imposed from above in the interests of large energy firms. According to campaigners, this approach threatened “irreversible environmental, cultural, social, and economic damage”. Similar conflicts around wind farms have emerged elsewhere in Europe, including in Germany, Sweden, and Cyprus.

Solar projects, which account for approximately one-fourth of Europe’s renewable electricity generation, have sparked similar disputes. In Romania’s county of Arad, plans for the Dama Solar project, expected to become Europe’s largest photovoltaic park, were challenged in court by a conservation association. The group argued that the project’s location within a Natura 2000 site posed risks to protected species. The legal challenge brought conservationists into direct conflict with developers and state authorities, who defended the project as essential to meeting renewable energy targets and strengthening energy security. The legal challenge – later suspended after the parties reached a negotiated agreement – reflects a broader pattern seen in parts of France, Spain, and Poland.

Energy transition projects are usually framed as a common story in which decarbonisation is urgent, energy security is fragile, and energy sovereignty is essential. Opposition, however, rarely follows a single script.

Beyond wind and solar, other parts of the energy transition attract less public attention but are no less central. Across Europe, enabling technologies such as grid expansion and battery production are also giving rise to green-on-green conflicts. Among these, mining projects linked to critical raw materials have proven particularly contentious, triggering strong mobilisation in countries including Serbia and Sweden.

In northern Portugal, plans to develop lithium mining near the municipality of Covas do Barroso were presented by authorities as a strategic contribution to Europe’s green transition. Local residents and environmental groups reacted quickly, organising demonstrations and pursuing legal challenges. Protesters described the area under this project as a sacrifice zone, expected to absorb environmental damage so that decarbonisation could move forward elsewhere. Such a framing was directed at what protesters saw as top-down decision-making and the marginalisation of the local population. One of the groups organising the protests, Unidos em Defesa de Covas do Barroso, summed up the criticism by arguing that “an energy transition that sacrifices the environment and is imposed on communities, rather than being built with them, devalues local knowledge and experience in affected areas and sets troubling anti-democratic precedents”.

From climate to territory

The rise of green-on-green conflicts points to broader shifts within environmental activism. One of the most striking is a growing unease with “climate” as the main focus of environmental campaigning. In some strands of radical environmentalism, “climate” is increasingly viewed as too abstract, technocratic, and closely tied to establishment politics. This scepticism is often linked to frustration with mainstream climate governance, which many activists see as slow and ineffective. While such a critique is not new, it has gained traction following the decline of the 2019 climate protests, which many participants felt failed to translate mass mobilisation into meaningful political change.

There is no evidence of a generalised reorientation across Europe. Still, anecdotal cases suggest this dynamic is taking shape. A clear example is the French radical group Les Soulèvements de la Terre, which brings together activists from different backgrounds, including former climate activists disillusioned with climate-focused mobilisation. The group has argued that climate politics remain too detached from lived realities, calling instead for territorially grounded struggles that “bring environmentalism down to Earth”.

This reorientation overlaps with a resurgence of place-based forms of environmental activism. Opposition to energy transition projects often draws on long-standing local traditions, including anti-nuclear movements and struggles against dams, mining, or industrial agriculture. These movements tend to frame environmental conflict as a defence of territory and everyday life against distant centres of political and economic power. Historically, they have operated at some distance from the climate-transition agenda. As the energy transition accelerates, tensions between these traditions are becoming more visible and, in some cases, openly confrontational.

Another factor contributing to these developments is the growing weight of anti-capitalism within green activism. For many groups, the issue is not decarbonisation as such, but the way it is being pushed through market-led models. On this view, green industries appear less as a break with past models than a rebranding of extractive and accumulative logics. That framing complicates any alignment with governmental and corporate approaches to the energy transition, even where there is broad agreement on the need to move away from fossil fuels.

Taken together, these shifts help explain why parts of green activism are moving towards a more territorial form of environmentalism, alongside growing scepticism toward climate governance. They also help account for the emergence of new alliances linking radical environmental activists, conservation groups, and residents of rural and peri-urban areas.

Green conflict goes upstream

Green-on-green conflicts are not confined to local protests, but increasingly register at the policy level. Although not always directly linked, these two levels often express the same underlying tensions, pointing to a fragmentation that goes well beyond specific sites. Among some pro-green parties, this has taken the form of resistance to decarbonisation initiatives involving any trade-offs.

While party discourse does not always map neatly onto the arguments advanced in local green-on-green conflicts, it often shares a similar underlying logic. Recent examples can be found across Europe. In Switzerland’s Valais region, the Green Party has opposed the installation of solar farms in Alpine areas. In Portugal, the left-wing party Bloco de Esquerda has joined campaigns against lithium mining projects framed as environmentally destructive.

A different, but telling, case comes from Spain, where similar tensions have played out in parliament. Following a nationwide blackout in 2025, the government put forward a decree to strengthen grid stability while reinforcing support for renewable energy. The proposal was ultimately rejected, including by the left-wing party Podemos, which otherwise presents itself as pro-green. Podemos argued that the reforms did too little to expand public ownership or democratic control and instead risked consolidating the power of existing energy players. These concerns might not be unfounded. Yet the immediate outcome was political deadlock: the decree failed, and no alternative measures followed. Opposition to renewable energy projects framed as benefiting large energy companies has since become a feature of Podemos’ energy discourse.

Taken together, these cases suggest a pattern: actors not directly responsible for delivering energy and industrial policy can more easily refuse trade-offs tied to energy transition projects, while those in government are structurally pushed towards defending them.

Actors not directly responsible for delivering energy and industrial policy can more easily refuse trade-offs tied to energy transition projects, while those in government are structurally pushed towards defending them.

An unavoidable tension

Green-on-green conflicts in Europe are intensifying at a particular political moment. They are unfolding amid a global backlash against environmentalism, which in the EU has translated into growing efforts to sideline environmental activism. At the same time, and somewhat paradoxically, the EU is moving to accelerate the build-out of energy and industrial infrastructure, despite the many contradictions in its green agenda. Together, these dynamics raise pressing questions about the direction of European environmental governance.

One way to interpret this trajectory is through the consolidation of some sort of a European raison d’état for energy. Invoking climate goals and energy security, Member States and EU institutions increasingly frame large energy and industrial projects as matters of strategic interest, to be delivered quickly and with fewer obstacles. Recent policy shifts, from streamlined permitting to the prioritisation of strategic projects, reflect this trend. Within EU policy discourse, the energy transition is now framed less around protecting people and environments, and more around competitiveness and scale.

If this trajectory continues, through the weakening of environmental safeguards, spatial planning rules, or participation requirements, green-on-green conflicts are likely to intensify and become more polarised. Some disputes may be pushed beyond institutional channels and into more confrontational forms of contestation.

Fragmentation within the green movement carries real political risk at a time when environmental actors need broad and durable coalitions to resist the backlash. If the green camp is to achieve any substantive change, it requires at least a minimal alignment of demands among those who support a green transition, so that competing priorities can be negotiated rather than pulling in opposing directions.

At the same time, cohesion cannot simply be imposed. Many of the demands voiced in green-on-green conflicts are legitimate. Energy transition projects are often driven by actors whose primary concern is corporate benefit rather than environmental or social outcomes, and the harms they generate are real. Urgency and ambition are frequently invoked to sideline participation, inclusion, or justice claims raised by local actors. From this perspective, disputes between green camps may function as necessary tensions. They force centres of power to confront the territories and communities where the transition takes material form, and they underline a basic point: no transition can claim legitimacy if it undermines ecosystems, habitats, and local communities in the process.

At a deeper level, these divisions reflect the central dilemma of the climate crisis itself. Decarbonisation must happen quickly and at scale, yet the actors most capable of delivering it in a socially just and territorially sensitive way currently lack the political power to do so. Given the urgency and magnitude of the task, a frictionless energy transition is hard to imagine, even under the most favourable political conditions. For this reason, while building large coalitions around climate action remains necessary, green-on-green conflicts are likely to persist.

Such tensions are not a deviation from the green transition, but a sign of how deeply it cuts across different ecological and political realities. For this reason, a conflict-free transition is not only unrealistic but also not necessarily desirable. The real question is not how to stop pro-green actors from clashing, but whether those clashes can be channelled into forces that reshape the energy transition rather than paralyse it.

A critical step on the path towards climate neutrality, the European Union’s 2040 target calls for a 90-per-cent reduction in emissions. Yet as far-reaching as this goal may seem, its provisions constitute a weakening of Europe’s climate ambitions under the Green Deal. By allowing costly and ineffective CO2 removal and storage technologies as a way of lowering emissions, the target risks deterring direct emission cuts and outsourcing pollution.

The European Union’s crucial 2040 climate target is one step closer to formal adoption after MEPs approved proposed revisions to the framework on 10 February. The 2040 target sits between the two main targets of the European Green Deal: the 2030 goal of cutting net greenhouse gas emissions by 55 per cent compared to 1990 levels, and the EU’s ultimate aim of achieving climate neutrality by 2050.

At first glance, the 2040 target may therefore seem like a less significant technical waypoint, but the opposite is true. The 2030 target can still be met by picking off some low-hanging fruit (especially power sector decarbonisation), and 2050 remains distant enough to spare vested interests real pain. The intermediate phase of the 2040 target is where deeply political choices have to be made – just as climate policy faces increasing resistance from within the EU, as well as mounting geopolitical pressure from the US to roll back decarbonisation in Washington’s attempt to assert fossil-fuel dominance over Europe.

The amended package sets a net reduction aim of 90 per cent by 2040 compared to 1990 levels. This figure still falls within the lower range of the 90-95 per cent reduction that the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change initially called for, giving the impression that the EU has actually decided to “stay the course” on its climate goals. But what is presented as continued ambition is, in practice, a dilution of Europe’s climate agenda behind a façade of headline goals. While the Advisory Board had called for domestic emission cuts, the final target offers the so-called “flexibility” to achieve 5 per cent emission reduction through international carbon credits, bringing down the required domestic effort to just 85 per cent.

Carbon crediting refers to the trading of certificates which represent a single tonne of CO2 (or another greenhouse gas) emissions that have been avoided or removed, allowing the buyers of such credits to claim they have compensated (or “offset”) their own emissions by financing reductions or removals elsewhere. This is deeply troubling: carbon crediting mechanisms have been found to deliver less than a fifth of the emission reductions they had promised in the past. In addition, their use shifts emission reduction efforts away from Europe to countries that have historically contributed far less to the climate crisis.

The controversial role of carbon removal

While most critical attention has focused on the role of international carbon credits, another major loophole has received far less scrutiny: the anticipated role of permanent carbon dioxide removal (CDR) in the 2040 target and its potential to undermine domestic mitigation efforts even further. CDR – once dismissed as risky geoengineering – has slipped into the mainstream of climate policy, including in the EU. The  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change defines CDR as “anthropogenic activities removing CO2 from the atmosphere and durably storing it in geological, terrestrial, or ocean reservoirs, or in products”. Climate change mitigation models cast it as indispensable to limit warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius: CDR is supposed to compensate residual emissions and, through net-negative emissions in the second half of this century, to bring temperatures back down after an overshoot of these targets – a scenario that is now widely considered inevitable.

Carbon sinks – above all forests – have played a prominent, and often controversial, role since the early days of international climate policy, not least because they were promoted by countries with powerful fossil industries as an alternative to cutting fossil emissions. In recent years, however, attention has shifted to so-called novel, more durable forms of CDR like BECCS (burning biomass to produce energy while capturing and storing the released CO2) and DACCS (removing CO2 directly from the air). One reason for this shift is that the capacity of forests to absorb CO2 is increasingly undermined by climate change itself, as well as by overharvesting. Second, there is increasing emphasis on long-lasting, “near-permanent” storage. CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels persist in the atmosphere for centuries, and there is a growing recognition that they must be matched with equally durable, near-permanent storage. While trees may release their stored carbon within a few decades (e.g., because they die and decompose, burn in wildfires, or are harvested), CO2 captured and stored underground is designed to remain there far longer – provided leakage from storage is avoided.

The EU began to seriously consider CDR in its 2018 long-term climate strategy, A Clean Planet for All, which formed the basis for the European Green Deal announced the following year. Since then, it has adopted a certification framework for carbon removal and channelled funding into DACCS, BECCS, and CO2 storage infrastructure through the Innovation Fund. In the United States, the Biden administration began heavily subsidising DACCS through the 45Q tax credit, a policy largely retained under Trump.

With the current design of the 2040 target, a major opportunity to establish a concrete guardrail has been missed.

All this is unfolding against the backdrop of persistent uncertainty about whether BECCS and DACCS can be scaled to the levels assumed in models. Deploying BECCS at that scale would require large chunks of land, much of it currently used for agriculture. Models assuming such extensive deployment appear driven by (implicit) assumptions of “available locations” – i.e., “empty lands” –  in the Global South that ignore existing ground-level land-use practices, and could pose threats to biodiversity and food security. DACCS, meanwhile, is immensely energy-intensive and continues to fall short of promised technological advances and cost reductions.

Despite these uncertainties and constraints, the promise of large-scale CDR carries a fundamental risk of mitigation deterrence – that is, delayed or reduced direct emission cuts due to the expectation that removals can do the work. Mitigation deterrence is based on the flawed assumption that reductions and removals are equivalent and thus interchangeable, creating a false sense of security that can slow urgent climate action. This assumption of interchangeability rests on carbon-accounting practices that treat every tonne of CO2 as the same, even though carbon removals vary widely in permanence and can have very different environmental and social impacts than direct emission cuts. Delaying near-term emission cuts in anticipation of future large-scale removal remains risky even if these expectations materialise in the long term, as higher interim CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere could trigger irreversible climate effects.

EU policymakers seem to be generally aware of these risks, frequently emphasising in Commission documents that emission reductions must remain the priority. Still, concrete safeguards to prevent overreliance on uncertain CDR technologies remain weak. With the current design of the 2040 target, a major opportunity to establish a concrete guardrail has been missed.

A key lever to limit mitigation deterrence

A central proposal to limit mitigation deterrence is to introduce separate targets for emissions reductions and carbon removals. The idea is straightforward: under a single net target, expectations of future CDR can too easily be used to justify slower near-term emission cuts. Net zero or climate neutrality targets typically do not specify how much gross emissions remain and how much carbon must be removed. In theory, net zero could be achieved even with persistently high emissions, provided they are all fully counterbalanced by CDR. This is, of course, highly implausible, but the target design itself fails to give any meaningful indication of how far emissions actually need to decline.

Separate targets, by contrast, specify to what extent emissions have to fall and CDR has to be scaled, limiting fungibility between emission reductions and CDR and ensuring that removals complement rather than substitute emission cuts. This sends an important political signal: separate targets make explicit that emission reductions are non-negotiable in the near term, counteracting the impression that future removals offer a license to postpone emission-reduction efforts today.

The politics of target separation

Mitigation deterrence is not just a theoretical risk – it can also be embedded in policymaking itself. In our research, we examined whether the idea of separating emission reduction and removal targets was taken seriously in the EU’s 2040 process, which actors supported or opposed it, and how different economic sectors with diverging interests towards climate change mitigation positioned themselves.

Notably, the idea of separate targets, initially advanced by a joint effort by NGOs, scientists, and other actors, figured prominently in the early stages of policy development. The European Commission explicitly asked stakeholders whether they preferred a net target or separate targets for emission reduction and removals. Evidence from the EU consultation process shows that support for separate targets was remarkably broad. A clear majority of stakeholders – including NGOs, research organisations, several member state authorities, and many business associations – endorsed target separation, though for different reasons.

A fine-grained look at sectoral positions suggests that support for or opposition to target separation maps closely onto underlying political-economic interests. Among the minority of actors advocating a net 2040 target – which represents only 21.2 per cent of all respondents – business entities are overwhelmingly dominant: they account for 81.2 per cent of all net-target supporters. This coalition is led by fossil fuel companies, energy-intensive industries, and the chemical sector. These actors justify their stance with cost-effectiveness arguments and link a net target to calls for integrating CDR into the EU Emission Trading Scheme (ETS), which would provide compliance flexibility for hard-to-abate process emissions.

In contrast, the coalition supporting target separation – backed by the majority of business actors and most non-industry stakeholders – comprises a very diverse set of sectors. CDR developers and start-ups see a dedicated removal target as a crucial market-creating signal for scaling investment. They are joined by biomass industries, parts of the cement sector, and several renewable and low-carbon utilities, for whom separation could prove helpful in protecting the value of their decarbonisation investments.

Even within carbon-intensive sectors, preferences diverge: a notable number of utilities and even some fossil actors (like BP) support separation. The result is an unusual coalition ranging from environmental NGOs to CDR providers and certain energy companies that converges on the need to distinguish reductions from removals through separate targets, even as their underlying motivations differ substantially.

Despite a clear majority of stakeholders favouring target separation, the European Commission chose not to propose a separate target in its 2040 communication. Our evidence points to three main reasons: a political drive to simplify climate governance and reduce regulatory burdens; concerns about industrial competitiveness amid energy-price shocks and global subsidy competition; and a preference for maintaining flexibility within a single net target to preserve political support for ambitious headline goals. In practice, however, appeals to flexibility and competitiveness end up weakening the emission reduction ambition established with the 2040 target. This amplifies precisely the mitigation deterrence risks that separate targets are meant to prevent.

A fine-grained look at sectoral positions suggests that support for or opposition to target separation maps closely onto underlying political-economic interests.

Of course, separate targets are not a cure-all. Mitigation deterrence arises from deep-seated structural forces in fossil-fuel-dependent economies and cannot be contained simply through political signalling effects alone. But despite these limitations, separating reduction and removal targets could be an effective guardrail – a necessary but not sufficient element to limit fungibility, reduce the risk of delayed action, and prioritise real emission cuts.

The next, and arguably most decisive, step in integrating CDR into EU climate policy will be its inclusion in the EU ETS, a move announced in the final negotiations of the 2040 target. To be clear, some amount of permanent CDR will be necessary to compensate emissions which are genuinely hard to abate – especially from industrial processes and agriculture. However, allowing the market to determine which major large emitters may counterbalance their emissions through CDR – simply on the basis of who is willing and able to pay the highest price – would bake mitigation deterrence from CDR into the very architecture of the EU Emission Trading Scheme. In the worst case, foreseeably scarce CDR capacity would serve to compensate for emissions from the oil and gas industry instead of being allocated to economic activities that are impossible or very hard to decarbonise.

Given the profound uncertainties of novel, permanent CDR like BECCS or DACCS, climate policy should minimise reliance on them – setting cautiously defined, separate removal targets that reflect technological uncertainty, alongside explicit political decisions about which emissions are truly hard to abate.

When a series of power outages hit Europe last year, the finger of blame was quickly – and falsely – pointed to an unlikely source: renewables. Blackouts are being used as a political tool to oppose the energy transition. But they can also become an opportunity for open discussions about energy infrastructure – a topic too often reserved only for technical audiences.

On 28 April, 2025, at 12:33 p.m., the Iberian Peninsula went dark. Electricity across Spain, Portugal, and a small portion of Southeast France was eventually restored, in some locations as late as the early hours of the next morning. Those hours were quickly immortalised through extensive coverage in both news outlets and social media. From groups of people gathered in parks and squares to rows of commuters walking along metro tunnels to reach the nearest exit, footage of the Iberian Peninsula blackout took the internet by storm.

Following the blackout, people were hotly debating their theories about the possible causes of these power outages: a rare atmospheric phenomenon, the consequence of European sanctions against Russia, or a cyberattack. Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD), a global coalition of non-governmental organisations committed to combating disinformation about climate change, monitored the spread of blackout-related narratives on social media. One narrative, CAAD found, especially gained traction: the claim that the Iberian Peninsula’s ongoing transition to renewable energy was to blame for the blackout.

Social media accounts with tens or hundreds of thousands of followers across Europe and beyond amplified this narrative. On X, Visegrád 24 – a Polish news aggregator known for spreading propaganda and fake news – posted to its 1.5 million followers: “Spain launched an experiment on April 16th to generate all power for the entire Iberian Peninsula only through renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and hydro. Today, their power grid collapsed.” Another post by the far-right financial news blog ZeroHedge, linking to their article titled “6 Days After Celebrating ‘100% Renewable Power’, Spain Blames ‘Rare Atmospheric Phenomenon’ For Nation’s Largest Blackout In History” was viewed over 200 thousand times. Comments were ironically celebratory: “Congrats on hitting Net Zero!” said one X user.

Renewable energy sources were also widely cited in newspaper headlines about the blackout. The Daily Mail, less than two hours after the outage, published an article titled “Could renewable energy be to blame for huge Spain blackout? How outage struck days after country’s grid ran entirely on green power for the first time”. On the day after the outages, Spain’s free English-language newspaper Euro Weekly News headlined “Spain’s 100% renewable energy target followed by historic blackout – coincidence?”

“If someone is rushing to blame renewables before we have any idea whether or not they’re actually to blame,” says Philip Newell, communications co-chair of CAAD, “I think that’s a pretty easy qualifier for disinformation.” Crucially, the renewables hypothesis stuck with people. Polling conducted by CAAD a few months after the blackout found that 36 per cent of the Spanish public and 22 per cent of the British public identified “the electricity grid’s excessive dependence on renewable energy” as one of the causes of the power cuts.

Culprit or scapegoat?

The narrative blaming renewables partly stemmed from early speculations that a lack of inertia in the Spanish electrical grid caused the power outages. In the context of an electrical grid, inertia refers to the energy stored in large electrical generators – such as conventional fossil, nuclear, and hydropower plants – which gives them the ability to momentarily continue providing power when the generator fails, as mechanical systems detect and remedy the failure.

Inertia is lower in electrical grids with high shares of renewable energy generation – such as in Spain, which in 2024 generated more than half of its electricity from renewable sources. This can make responding effectively and in time to changes in frequency more difficult, thereby posing risks to grid stability. According to a 2025 review, there are several strategies that electricity grids with high penetration of renewable energy sources can deploy to face this challenge. These include, for example, using energy storage devices such as batteries, or employing power electronics to emulate traditional generator stability – a system referred to as synthetic inertia.

Nonetheless, an early report by the Spanish government in June found that inertia levels were not lower than those recommended by the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E). Commenting on the report after its release, energy analyst Ketan Joshi wrote that several conventional power stations – nuclear, coal, and gas – appeared to have failed to provide voltage control. Subsequently, a surge in voltage was confirmed to be the proximate cause of the blackout by the ENTSO-E Expert Panel’s analysis, published in October 2025.

In other words, the outage was not caused by low inertia. A sharp increase in voltage triggered widespread protective shutdowns of generation and transmission assets, resulting in a system-wide blackout within approximately 30 seconds. This anomalous sequence of events makes the Iberian blackout the “first ever of its kind”.

An expert panel is expected to deliver an analysis of the root causes of the Iberian Peninsula blackout by the first quarter of this year. In the meantime, Damian Cortinas, the chairman of ENTSO-E, says that, based on what has emerged so far, Spain’s growing dependence on renewable energy did not play a role in triggering the April blackout.

Echoes in the EU

For the European Right, the Iberian Peninsula blackout presented an opportunity to discredit the energy transition at large. On 30 June 2025, months before the publication of ENTSO-E’s factual report, German MEP Markus Buchheit of far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) sent a written question to the European Commission. In it, Buchheit claimed that the blackout “highlights the real risks of an energy transition driven by ideological dogma rather than technical or strategic considerations”. He urged the Commission to acknowledge that “a forced energy transition” endangers the member states’ security of electricity supply and asked that current energy policies be revised to allow EU countries to “strengthen conventional energy sources, such as nuclear or gas”.

For the European Right, the Iberian Peninsula blackout presented an opportunity to discredit the energy transition at large.

Buchheit was not alone in linking the Iberian Peninsula blackout to the energy transition. Austrian MEPs Georg Mayer and Harald Vilimsky, of the sovereigntist parliamentary group Patriots for Europe, asked the Commission whether it was “prepared to subject the targets of the Green Deal and of the ‘Fit for 55’ package to a substantive review in order to minimise risks to security of supply and to competitiveness, as well as the burden on European households, rather than rigidly sticking to ideologically driven targets”.

“The Spanish blackout has essentially become a tool for the political forces that are against renewables to say that renewables cause blackouts, even though it’s been proven that it wasn’t actually renewables,” explains EU parliamentary assistant and energy expert Jaume Loffredo. He says there is a risk that the memory of the Iberian Peninsula blackout might fuel anti-renewables campaigns for years.

“Simple answers”

The Iberian Peninsula blackout was not the only case in which power outages led to the spread of narratives critical of the green transition. In June, several neighbourhoods in the Northern Italian city of Turin suffered a series of blackouts. Over the weekend of June 13-15, thousands of citizens were left without power for periods ranging from minutes to more than ten hours. Iren, the company that manages electricity distribution in Turin, explained that the power outages were exacerbated by the summer heat. In particular, technical failures in the joints connecting the cables were responsible for about 80 per cent of the outages. The failures were made more likely by high ground temperatures, as well as the obsolescence of the infrastructure. Hotter weather also played a role in overloading the city’s electrical grid as electricity demand increased with people turning on ventilators and air conditioning units.

In the summer months, higher temperatures due to climate change make the European electrical grid more vulnerable to power outages. A 2024 analysis by CORRECTIV.Europe found that the number of cooling-degree days – an index that measures days on which the average temperature is above 24°C, necessitating the use of artificial cooling systems – has increased across most of Europe, with countries in the south particularly affected. Between 2014 and 2023, the analysis shows, Malta and Cyprus experienced significantly more intense summer heat compared to the 1980s. This was also the case in countries like Italy, Spain, and Greece.

The outages in Turin gave way to different yet similar narratives to the ones circulating after the Iberian Peninsula blackout. In particular, citizens called into question charging stations for electric vehicles (EVs). On 18 June, the daily La Stampa featured a letter highlighting this concern: “The media repeatedly blamed the heat, the distribution network, and air conditioning,” wrote a Turin resident. “I would like to draw attention to the charging stations for electric cars, which are increasingly present in the city.” On Facebook, comments under an article by La Stampa regarding the blackout expressed similar worries. “What about green cars charging? Is no one thinking about that?” one of them read.

In fact, there is no indication that EV charging stations contributed to the Turin power outages. According to energy and policy expert Marine Cornelis, whose work focuses on just energy transitions, such narratives take hold when people are scared. “When we are exposed to blackouts, we need to think about where our energy comes from and what is happening to us,” Cornelis explains. “We are dependent on something, and it’s scary, it’s extremely scary.” She continues: “And when people are scared, they look for simple answers.”

“Self-fulfilling prophecy”

Fear plays an important role in shaping the narratives surrounding blackouts. A 2023 report from the EU Disinfo Lab analysed how different actors in Germany used fears over the alleged threat of an imminent blackout to push back against the energy transition in the country. The report notes that Europäisches Institut für Klima und Energie (EIKE), Germany’s most prominent climate-sceptic organisation, has been vocal in amplifying this narrative to discredit the energy transition. EIKE instrumentalises the fear of blackouts in line with a broader message of climate change denial: the energy transition is framed as unnecessary in the face of a problem that it claims is overblown.

EU Disinfo Lab found that the far-right AfD also played an active role in turning blackout fears into a political weapon. By collecting and amplifying unverified reports of alleged blackouts through initiatives such as the “Blackoutmelder” platform, AfD sought to create the impression of a systemic energy failure.

In the aftermath of the Iberian Peninsula and Turin blackouts, the EU Disinfo Lab’s aim of alerting against “a rising hoax and conspiracy that risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy anytime a power shortage occurs” has taken on greater urgency. These cases also point to the dangers of social media information environments. “Social media companies like X, TikTok, and Facebook reward engaging content without any sort of information integrity safeguards,” warns CAAD’s Philip Newell. On these platforms, breaking news moments such as blackouts create “a race for virality” in which algorithmic amplification intersects with partisan rhetoric and propaganda. The effect is clear in the case of the Iberian Peninsula blackout: months after the event, CAAD’s polling found that “seven in ten Spanish people and six in ten in the UK fell for at least one false narrative about the blackout causes.”

Beyond the political instrumentalisation of blackouts by climate sceptics and critics of the energy transition, power outages are moments that can be harnessed for broader public discussions over energy infrastructure.

Information and participation

Addressing online disinformation is thus one piece of the puzzle. According to Newell, one solution is to treat disinformation spread via digital platforms by monetised social media accounts as a form of false advertising. “Governments all over the world protect their people from bad products and so regulators should treat social media the exact same,” Newell explains. “False advertising is illegal, and a lot of this is more or less just covert false advertising for the fossil fuel industry.” When polled by CAAD about the causes of the Iberian Peninsula blackout, a majority of UK and Spanish citizens favoured measures to control the spread of climate disinformation online to “ensure informed public discourse”. As Newell puts it, “Not only are the solutions possible, they’re popular.”

Beyond the political instrumentalisation of blackouts by climate sceptics and critics of the energy transition, power outages are moments that can be harnessed for broader public discussions over energy infrastructure. Cornelis explains that the rumours that emerge in the wake of electrical blackouts – like the ones in Turin – should be seen as opportunities to address people’s genuine questions about the energy transition. She continues: “Can we use these moments to ask: where does electricity come from? Why do blackouts happen? What role do electric cars play? Are more EVs a risk for blackouts?” People have concerns and uncertainties regarding the energy transition. These concerns, warns Cornelis, should not be dismissed – and neither should institutions communicate about energy and energy infrastructure in an overly complex manner. “The problem is that institutions are incapable of talking to people normally, as if they were sitting in a cafe,” she concludes.

Blackouts show that disinformation, fear, and mistrust of institutions all affect how people react to solutions proposed in the framework of the energy transition. But attitudes towards these solutions, including renewable energy, are also shaped by whether people feel a sense of agency. As horizontal approaches to energy production, such as renewable energy cooperatives, suggest, the energy transition can be a way to bring people together and empower communities. The promise of simply keeping the lights on is not enough to build majorities around renewables.

The research for this article was made possible thanks to the support of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung European Union | Global Dialogue’s Climate Change Disinformation Media Fellowship 2025.

As democratic, citizen-led initiatives, energy communities play an important role in the ongoing efforts to speed up Europe’s transition to renewables. Yet behind their progressive image, familiar inequalities endure: women and FLINTA are still largely absent from membership and decision-making. If these grassroots projects are meant to reshape not only how energy is produced but who holds power, the question of gender can no longer be treated as secondary.

Energy communities are often regarded as one of the most promising developments linked to the energy transition – and for good reasons. REScoop.eu, the European federation of energy communities, describes them as a “way to ‘organise’ citizens that want to cooperate together in an energy-sector related activity based on open and democratic participation and governance, so that the activity can provide services or other benefits to the members or the local community”. This covers a wide range of organisations and endeavours, with very different sizes and ways of producing energy, from solar and hydro to wind and biomass. Common features include self-organised, decentralised energy production, a focus on renewables, and – unfortunately – a persisting underrepresentation of women. Studies show that over 70 per cent of members of electricity energy communities and more than 83 per cent of boards are male.

It might seem nitpicky to discuss gender dynamics in the context of the energy transition in general, and even more so in the microcosm of energy communities, which are only just establishing themselves in most EU member states. However, gender remains a useful lens for describing the experience of more than half of the population and looking at political phenomena, including energy politics.

Moreover, energy communities are interesting laboratories as they take on the energy transition from the ground up, close to people’s daily lives. The structures and dynamics present in such settings can both reflect and shape the direction of change.

A political transition

Our current energy systems impact women more negatively than men. This begins with the extraction of fossil fuels, which puts Indigenous women and two spirit people -at increased risk of (sexual) violence. These groups also suffer more from the immediate effects of fossil fuel consumption, such as pollution from cooking. The longer-term effects of climate change have also been documented to be gender-biased: women face more health hazards, are at a higher risk during climate disasters, and so on.

The energy industry employs fewer women and pays them less, and also exacerbates their (energy) poverty. Similarly, energy governance has been male-dominated in the past, at both national and European levels. Simply put, the current energy systems are not working out for women in so many ways, and energy communities have yet to break free from this dynamic. Therefore, gender needs to be taken into account for energy justice, along with intersectional experiences of inequality and oppression, which also include class, sexuality, ethnicity, and age. Yet, as researcher Barbara Nicoloso has shown, the political side of the energy transition has not received enough attention.

Energy politics are sensitive to politics at large and vested political interests. The backlash against the European Green Deal aims to slow down the energy transition – even as studies, again and again, refute the claim that voters oppose climate measures. At the same time, the geopolitical stakes connected to the dependence on fossil fuels have been crystal clear since the invasion of Ukraine, with high energy prices escalating energy poverty in Europe. In the years following the invasion, the EU has managed to diversify its energy supply (albeit at times with painful trade-offs), but renewables are being vilified by the far right. In Germany, for instance, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has often criticised wind power and advocated resuming cheap fossil imports from Russia.

Energy politics reflect the structures and priorities of the societies in which they are created. This means that an underrepresentation of women in a niche subset of engaged energy prosumers is not a coincidence but a product of politics. It is a warning signal that the energy transition, if treated as a way of plugging out from one system into a new one, even by supporters of renewables, will carry over counterproductive and unfair blind spots.

Levelling the field

Energy communities represent a microcosm of the broader questions that progressives and greens are wrangling with across Europe. Can the energy transition be truly participatory? How can it be accelerated and its scope widened? The social and political dynamics are at least as important as the technical considerations.

Given that energy communities are most of the time founded and kept alive only by volunteers, having more members means more engagement, resources, and, ultimately, more momentum. While energy communities originated from an ambitious movement for the energy transition, currently, they often remain limited to a largely homogenous group of highly educated, high-income men.

If energy communities can get better at increasing the number of women among their members, the decentralised energy transition picks up speed. What can be done to create a positive feedback loop between women’s participation in energy communities, gender equality, and the energy transition?

The case of German energy communities is particularly interesting because Germany is the country with the most energy communities in the EU, and has a long history of bottom-up activism and political turbulence related to the energy transition.

According to Lara Track, project manager at Netzwerk Energiewende Jetzt e.V., an organisation which supports energy communities, the connection between the fight for gender equality and the energy transition is impossible to ignore, even if it has been overlooked for too long.

Women, lesbians, andintersex, nonbinary, trans, and a-gender individuals (sometimes referred to in German by the acronym FLINTA) are much less represented in energy communities, but also in the energy transition as a whole. Track, who has worked extensively on the role of FLINTA in the energy transition, says it is essential to increase their Teilhabe, their “having a stake”, which is more than just participation (Teilnahme).

Focusing on participation alone as a vehicle for gender equality and representation has proven vulnerable to tokenism and oversimplification. By contrast, having a stake (through taking ownership of a project, by serving on the board or simply being part of a community) means having a voice and, ultimately, power. This stronger type of participation usually comes more easily to affluent people, homeowners, and cis men as they have more opportunities to participate, explains Track. Those who want to mainstream gender into energy communities have to swim against the tide in their struggle for representation, inclusion, and power. According to Track, while gender is often an important topic, energy communities might end up prioritising other areas and fail to create structures for participation.

Having a stake means having a voice and, ultimately, power.

Kiara Groneweg, who works on energy at Women Engage for a Common Future (a nonprofit network working on the gender-climate nexus), agrees with Track that merely symbolic participation and representation risks reinforcing the status quo rather than bringing about transformative change and stronger equality.

As an example, Groneweg mentions Katherina Reiche, the current energy minister and former CEO of a subsidiary of the energy giant E.ON, as an example for women using their positions of power to pre-empt structural change. Reiche, has proposed restrictions on the rollout of renewables, such as requiring them to pay for grid extension and limiting compensation for feeding electricity back into the grid. Former Green state secretary Sven Giegold criticised these proposals as an attempt to stall decentralised renewable production.

Still, Groneweg acknowledges that when it comes to representation in energy communities, “women attract women and FLINTA attract FLINTA.” She continues: “If you have a male board with a very high speaking time, some FLINTAs are just not going to be interested in entering and discussing, because the structure does not fit from the get-go.” The attraction that comes with increased representation is crucial to breaking open male-dominated structures. As Track puts it, “people like to work together with people with whom they can feel a connection relatively easily.”

However, socio-economic inequalities stand in the way of increasing representation, says Groneweg. For her, the discussion on a socially just energy transition also needs to be clear-eyed about unequal access to capital, housing, and property. This access is limited in Germany, where more than half of the population lives in rental properties and one in five people is at risk of poverty or social exclusion – and the figure doubles for single-parent households.

These numbers are deeply gendered. Women represent the vast majority (85 per cent) of single-parent households, earn 16 per cent less, and have much lower pensions than men on average.

With 75 per cent of European housing stock classified as energy inefficient, the heating transition is the soft underbelly of the energy transition. Groneweg stressed that for heating, individual solutions are practically insufficient, especially for the 53 per cent of people in Germany who rent. Since renovations and retrofitting with heat pumps have been highly politically inflammatory in Germany, these larger structural solutions are unaddressed, leaving the populations who suffer as a result to compensate for high energy costs on their own.

Competitive mentality

When Marina Braun – an engineer and founder and board member of several energy communities – decided to get involved in the sector, she considered being the first woman to join a male-only energy community. She even knew some of the men sitting on the board, which made things easier. Eventually, however, she decided to devote her efforts to a younger, more diverse energy community.

“I realised that their drive was somehow completely different,” she recalls. “There were women involved, too. I had this gut feeling that I would feel more comfortable than in the other energy community because they were actively looking for women. I thought that maybe there would not be that ‘elbow mentality’ – and well, that was kind of a deciding factor for me.”

Kerstin Lopau, engineer and co-founder of SoLocal Energy, had a negative experience in male-dominated energy communities, where she faced a lack of conversational generosity and a competitive mindset – the “elbow mentality” also mentioned by Braun. A more pleasant culture of communication, in her experience, also leads to greater productivity and a cooperative approach to solving problems.

Like Track and Groneweg, Lopau believes that representation is no miracle cure for gender equality. For example, sitting on the board of a company – a structure that is often quite hierarchical and conformist – can lead women to follow male ideals and lose solidarity with other women. In energy communities, however, the picture is a bit different according to Lopau: boards tend to be more democratic, with various mechanisms to ensure control and transparency, which prevents alienation and loss of solidarity. 

Cultivating the field

German energy communities are often Genossenschaften (“cooperatives”) which encompass a specific ethos, legal status, and structure. These organisations aim to help their members pursue their own economic, social, or cultural goals through joint operations. They traditionally follow the principles of self-help, self-responsibility, and self-management.

In her work, Track has observed that energy communities can spark conversations around new, sustainable ways to create and retain value. Energy communities are levers for people to benefit locally from the energy transition, especially those who are currently not benefiting, she notes. In the energy sector, this is crucial. Community energy projects have been shown to generate two to eight times more local revenue than if the project were carried out by an external actor. In Germany, where much of the electricity produced in the east of the country flows westward, aggravating existing imbalances, this local aspect has immense potential.

The discussion on a socially just energy transition also needs to be clear-eyed about unequal access to capital, housing, and property.

Track says it’s surprising that more municipalities don’t make use of energy communities to counter the “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) phenomenon and build local energy democracy. According to Groneweg, however, with the time and volunteer effort it takes to set up energy communities (especially in a country like Germany, bogged down by immense bureaucratic hurdles), energy communities alone should not be held responsible for removing structural barriers and solving broader political problems like energy poverty.

Instead, the energy community movement could join forces with other social movements, such as the feminist and climate communities. “I am hoping for a feminist energy movement fighting to grow decentralised energy systems. Then we would have more people getting engaged. That would mean that in an energy community, which maybe now has around 20 volunteers, suddenly 200 are engaged, and it grows from city to city, or village to village,” says Groneweg.

For Lopau, it is a positive development that solar panels have become a mass product, taking energy generation out of the realm of technology geeks and into the familiar world of the local supermarket. Small photovoltaic modules make it very accessible for renters to create their own solar system on their balconies. For those who consume little or are energy poor, the savings generated from a solar module on a balcony are relatively greater than for those who consume a lot.

Renewables allow for local energy production and are the most democratic and accessible way to provide energy to date. However, these energy sources are still strongly influenced by previous energy systems and their gender dynamics, Lopau notes. She sees renewables as a fertile field that now needs cultivation to realise its full potential, including through the inclusion of FLINTA in energy communities. However, there remain small and big obstacles that energy communities have to overcome to balance their membership.

“Energy communities don’t exist in a vacuum”

The first hurdles potential new members of an energy community face are the up-front and recurring costs associated with membership. Energy communities can pre-empt this by offering solidarity pricing models.

Lopau, who has been active in democratising balcony solar systems, acknowledges that renewables are often not a top priority for those who face (energy) poverty and the mental burden and stress associated with it. She says that energy communities should rely less on the internal motivations of green-minded people. For this to become a reality, potential users should be proactively sought after and supported.

But financial barriers are not the only obstacle to participation. Since energy communities rely on individual and collective efficacy, people who lack self-confidence or experience in civil society or in local collective endeavours, such as sports associations, can face mental barriers and underestimate themselves and their abilities. For Braun, it is important to remind people that energy communities are a collective endeavour. Members will always work with others; no one will be left hanging, and they always follow a 4-to-6-eye principle, she says.

Gender stereotypes also contribute to the underrepresentation of women. Braun, who studied engineering, suggests that the gender gap in STEM fields also has to do with the names of degree programs and the emphasis on technical aspects. Terms like “energy technology” or “renewable technology” tend to foreground the technical elements traditionally associated with masculinity, obscuring the legal, organisational, and social questions linked to renewables.

Braun stresses that gender stereotypes can be challenged. “This is a topic that anyone can learn and understand. You just have to take time for it, like you need time for learning how to knit, paint, and any other skill you want to get better at”.

However, time scarcity also disproportionately affects women. In Germany, women spend 44,3 per cent more time on care work than men, making up an unpaid second shift of 30 hours per week. This work has been estimated to amount to an unpaid 826 billion euros a year, and is the precondition for all paid labour. Without giving and taking care, like teaching children how to speak, solve conflicts or build social relations, other economic activities would simply not be possible. When governments push to extend the work week to increase economic output, they risk reinforcing the gender care gap. They also reduce the time available for democratic engagement and participation. 

These are broader questions that inevitably affect energy communities, which mostly rely on volunteer work. As Track puts it: “Energy communities do not exist in a vacuum. And everything we do structurally to further gender equality is going to benefit gender equality within energy communities.”

Skills that matter

One of the strategies that energy community organisers pursue to attract FLINTA is to highlight that different skills are needed. Communication, administration, legal, or finance skills are essential to build the organisation before any windmill or solar panel field is approved

Braun explains that, especially at the beginning, it is key to have people on board who know how to build an organisation – practically and socially. “Women are simply very good at building organisations structurally, in project management, (they) are very considerate, very empathetic- and that’s what’s essential for an energy community in the end.” Reaching out to people, convincing them, and taking them on board is connected to a set of emotional and social skills (which are in fact skills, and not innate qualities) that women and FLINTA often demonstrate.

Researchers have demonstrated strong evidence for the benefits of working in more diverse teams. One example, brought up by Braun, is increased risk aversion. In her experience, while men tend to take more risks and postpone addressing worst-case scenarios, greater interaction between genders in discussions balances out these tendencies, leading for instance to a more sound risk assessment of what to invest in, for example.

For Lopau, actively pursuing a more diverse membership can also have important domino effects, such as opening new perspectives and opportunities to grow the community, and making the space more welcoming for everyone – including potential new members.

Track mentions the example of a female-led energy community she has worked with: “I find it interesting that when there are two chairwomen, childcare programs are thought of.” She adds: “They are not the only ones, but not everyone is doing it.”

With an eye on the energy transition, which sometimes struggles with community backing and NIMBY, it becomes evident that social and organisational skills – traditionally gendered and devalued – are what determine the impact of an energy community. While from the outside it may seem that lacking technological skills makes participation in energy communities meaningless, in truth, it is social and organisational skills that can grow and scale the movement.

“Don’t listen to the men”    

Kerstin Lopau wants to tackle the underrepresentation of women in energy communities at its roots and do things in a radically different way. In previous years, she hosted a summer camp for young people to learn how to install solar panels. After receiving feedback that some FLINTA did not sign up because they didn’t feel safe, Lopau took action. Ever since, she and her colleagues at SoLocal Energy have been hosting solar camps specifically made for FLINTA. Their approach is to be aware of the gaps, to “always try to look closely at what people need. We know from our own experience working in the field what feels awkward, so we try to figure out what could feel better.”

These solar camps are also meant to be a ladder to future employment for those who would like to pursue this path professionally. Lopau has been strategic about building relationships with the local skilled trade scene in North Hesse. She requested their expertise and knowledge, even when this was not strictly necessary. These collaborations led to some really good contacts. She recalled that the tradespeople “saw on site, ‘okay, alright, they do know what they are doing, and they are competent – and not as bad as we thought. Maybe we can pick up a few trainees and workers here.’ – So it was a bit of a win-win situation.”      

A central pillar of this summer camp is networking, as building relationships between these future energy professionals during the camp has been valuable. It builds the participants’ energy literacy and confidence, letting them show up differently, empowered, in their energy communities or future jobs. Lopau shares that a former summer camp participant emailed her about a technical question. “You said that’s how you have to do it, but the men here say you don’t have to do it like that,” the participant wrote. Lopau answered: “No, don’t listen to the men. You remembered correctly.”

This article is informed by the work of Barbara Nicoloso, whose essay “Gender Power: The energy transition through a gender lens” and policy brief “Gender at the Heart of the EU Energy Transition: Key learnings from the French case” have earlier been published by the Green European Foundation.