Energy Saving in Low-Income Households: Synergy or Misery for Climate Justice Objectives?

Energy consumption and its carbon footprint are known to increase with household income. Yet it is low-income households that are being encouraged to save energy by a German energy-saving program under the National Climate Initiative. Although such a policy approach can be seen as problematic from a climate justice perspective, the program is widely regarded as a flagship project of socially just climate policy. This is due to the fact that low-income households benefit more financially from energy savings in their homes: they have to spend a larger proportion of their income on energy costs than high-income groups. This raises the question of whether the program effectively mitigates social inequalities in the realm of climate justice, or whether it exacerbates them.

The paper studies the implementation of the “Energy-saving-check” in Germany. To reduce CO2 emissions, the program advises low-income households on sustainable energy consumption through peer-to-peer coaching. Funded by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment and run jointly by energy agencies and the charity organization Caritas, it trains long-term unemployed people to coach welfare recipients on domestic energy saving. Since 2008, the program has coached about 412.000 households nationwide and claims to have saved more than 720.000 tons CO2.

Using qualitative evidence from semi-structured interviews with politicians, local coordinators, and participants (N = 45) and ethnographic observations of household coaching sessions (24 days), we provide systematic sociological insights into the practices and normative attributions of energy saving in low-income households at the different program levels. In particular, we show how environmental goals at the political level are decoupled from the local practice of the household coaching, which is strongly embedded in a value framework of charity and social counseling. In doing so, we contribute to the ongoing debate on environmental inequality and climate justice in the Anthropocene.