Greening the Home

Nina Lopez-Uroz

Compared to progress in greening electricity generation, end-user sectors like buildings and transport continue to lag in reducing CO₂ emissions. Housing emerges increasingly as a focal point of contestation in the climate crisis, both from mitigation and adaptation perspectives, as it accounts for 40 percent of the EU’s energy consumption and is increasingly impacted by other extreme weather events. Housing is also one of the most public-facing and sensitive domains of the green transition, as it directly affects households’ everyday lives, wealth, and financial security, making interventions vulnerable to politicization. In this context, the project examines how governments intervene in the decarbonization of housing and how different factors shape the pace of this transition. It contributes to comparative political economy and climate politics by highlighting how governments handle the distributive conflicts inherent to the two logics in this field: greening energy supply through low-carbon technologies and lowering energy demand through improvements in building energy efficiency. Both mobilize distinct constituencies, including consumers, construction and real-estate actors, utilities, and heating-system manufacturers. The project analyzes these dynamics in several country cases to explain policy variation.