The times they are changing? Support for green policy measures in Germany in times of uncertainty

Even amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequences of the war in Ukraine, environmental protection continues to rank high on the list of most important problems in Germany. The public and political discourse is dominated by debates around energy supply (e.g., green energy infrastructure), CO 2 -reduction efforts (e.g., taxes on fossil fuels), reaching the Paris goals, as well as the perennial issues of transition costs, sustainable diets, and transportation, just to name a few. Effective environmental governance has been identified as a necessary condition for successfully mitigating and adapting to a warming climate, putting “green” public policy support into the spotlight. Employing three novel datasets from an online access panel in Germany, this paper analyzes policy support regarding different “green” policy options as well as its development in recent years, encompassing phases of significant global uncertainty, particularly in the context of the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and the resulting energy crisis. The results indicate that support was remarkably stable across the three datapoints and that previous scientific findings hold also in times of uncertainty.