Not in My Basement: How Cost Perceptions and Reform Narratives Undermine Clean-Energy Transitions

Climate action provokes voter opposition when it imposes concentrated and eas ily identifiable costs, but reforms often expose households to uncertain rather than known financial burdens. We argue that this uncertainty allows individuals to de velop subjective cost expectations and narratives, generating widespread opposi tion that extends beyond those most directly exposed. We study these dynamics in the context of Germany’s 2023 heating law, a large-scale reform to decarbonize the housing sector. We combine AI-assisted qualitative interviews and open-ended survey responses from 2,377 respondents with two experiments to explore the drivers of reform opposition. We show that opposition is prevalent and linked to subjective cost perceptions and anti-reform narratives emphasizing rising energy prices and government overreach. Subjective cost perceptions are only weakly tied to actual heating conditions and vary systematically with partisan identity. Even major policy redesigns fail to generate majority support. These results advance our understanding of when large-scale climate reforms fail.