The EU ETS and the elusive politics of public acceptance
How Europe’s Conditional Middle Shapes the Feasibility of Carbon Pricing
A Fragmented Public: 36% Supporters, 33% Conditionals, 21% Opposers
The European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) is the EU’s flagship climate policy instrument. It caps emissions from major industrial and energy sectors and allows firms to buy and trade emission allowances. By putting a price on carbon, it is meant to encourage companies to innovate and reduce their environmental footprint. While the ETS has proven effective in reducing emissions, its complexity and distributional effects make implementation challenging, particularly when it comes to securing public acceptance.
This tension is clearly illustrated by a recent cross-national study, “Six Faces of Climate Policy Support in the EU”, and by its expanded follow-up analysis “Climate Policy Feasibility across Europe Relies on the Conditional Middle” (Smith et al., 2025), which investigates how European citizens perceive and support different climate policies, including the ETS. Drawing on a large survey conducted across multiple EU member states, with more than 19,000 respondents across 13 countries, the study deliberately moves beyond simplistic labels such as “pro-climate” or “climate-sceptic.” Instead, it examines the complexity of public attitudes, demonstrating that support for climate policy is not fixed but rather shaped by varying degrees of commitment, confidence, and perceived personal and societal impacts.
The Conditional Middle: one third of Europeans who decide on climate legitimacy
Rather than assuming a single “public opinion”, the authors develop a fine-grained profiling of public attitudes. In the new study, the earlier six-type distinction is replaced by a clearer four-group classification: Supporters, Opposers, Neutrals, and a large pivotal group called “Conditionals”, which represents about one-third of Europeans and is central to the political feasibility of climate policy. What distinguishes Conditionals is not indifference, but high responsiveness to policy design: their preferences shift systematically depending on how a measure distributes costs and benefits. The study shows that policy design alone explains 63% of the variance in their support, while countries, demographics, and political attitudes account for only a small fraction.
The research shows that support for climate policy crucially depends on how people perceive its consequences. Citizens who associate climate measures with positive outcomes, such as innovation, improved health, or job creation, tend to express stronger and more durable support. By contrast, individuals who see climate action primarily as costly, economically risky, or unfair are more likely to remain unconvinced or to shift their views in response to political or economic shocks.
The new analysis highlights that the Conditional Middle is not ideologically fixed but highly sensitive to specific policy design choices: perceived costs and benefits, rather than demographics or political identity, explain the overwhelming majority of variation in their support (policy design alone accounts for 63%).
ETS Support: net-positive but highly elastic among conditionals
When this framework is applied to the ETS, a clear pattern emerges. While Supporters consistently view carbon markets as an effective tool for decarbonisation, Conditionals also show net-positive support for ETS-related measures, including extensions to heating, transport, and agriculture, as well as the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. Their support, however, is highly elastic and shifts depending on how the distributional consequences of emissions trading are perceived.
The study also makes it clear that most citizens do not fall into this group. The “conditional middle” – the largest segment – does not reject climate action in principle but is acutely sensitive to questions of fairness and personal economic impact. These citizens may agree with the idea of the ETS on paper yet withdraw their support if they perceive it as a driver of higher energy prices, loss of competitiveness, or threats to employment in carbon-intensive regions. In areas undergoing industrial restructuring or coal phase-out, attitudes toward the ETS are closely intertwined with concerns about economic security and regional identity. For Conditionals, support for the ETS is real but fragile: it depends not on the instrument’s technical sophistication but on whether its design appears economically balanced and socially fair.
In this context, communication and policy design become central to maintaining the instrument’s legitimacy. The updated study sheds light on how citizens prefer the revenues generated by ETS-type instruments to be used. Conditionals consistently prioritise climate adaptation and support for vulnerable households, while giving much lower priority to compensating fossil-fuel workers. These preferences indicate that distributive fairness – and the broad social orientation of revenue use – plays a central role in shaping Conditional support.
A moving target: why the future of ETS depends on the Conditional Middle
The study thus highlights that the durability of support for the ETS is primarily shaped by the perceived balance of costs and benefits, rather than by ideological divides or trust in institutions. Citizens evaluate carbon pricing according to its tangible effects: whether it reduces emissions, how burdens are distributed, and whether benefits are felt broadly across society. Public acceptance is therefore not a by-product of technical performance but a function of policy design and its distributional consequences. The key lesson is that climate policy needs a social narrative. A policy such as the ETS will not secure lasting support simply because it reduces emissions. It will do so when citizens feel they are treated fairly, when governments clearly explain its purpose and effects, and when they demonstrate how revenues contribute to shared prosperity. The Six Faces framework provides policymakers with a practical tool for designing communication and engagement strategies that reflect the diversity of European public opinion. The updated evidence shows that the Conditional Middle is a movable constituency whose support depends directly on concrete design features and the perceived visibility and fairness of outcomes. Rather than assuming uniform support or resistance, it encourages acknowledging that citizens differ not only in what they believe, but in how firmly those beliefs are held.
Ultimately, the study suggests that Europe’s path to climate neutrality will depend not only on innovative policy design but on institutions’ capacity to build and sustain social consent. The EU ETS illustrates this particularly well: a technically sophisticated instrument can only succeed if it is also perceived as socially legitimate. This challenge will become even more visible with the introduction of the new ETS2 for buildings and road transport, where carbon pricing will affect citizens more directly in their everyday lives. In a political moment marked by economic uncertainty and the rise of anti-climate narratives, the findings of Six Faces of Climate Policy Support offer a timely reminder that public acceptance remains both the EU’s most strategic asset – and its most elusive resource.
To learn more about it:
Smith, E. K., Mlakar, Ž., Levis, A., Sanford, M., Stapper, L., Bouman, T., … Pianta, S. (2025) Climate Policy Feasibility across Europe Relies on the Conditional Middle. Nature Climate Change (forthcoming). https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/pnvw8_v3
Visit the online dashboard of CAPABLE on the results of the survey: https://capableclimate.eu/online-tool/
A policy brief also highlights the main findings of this survey and provides guidance on navigating the online dashboard. https://capableclimate.eu/pb3-dashboard/
