How ready are people really for ambitious climate policy? Far readier than those in power assume — and that gap matters for everyone working to scale Power-to-X. A new study by social psychologist Wilhelm Hofmann at the Ruhr University Bochum finds that German politicians systematically underestimate how strongly citizens support ambitious climate measures, including the taxes and regulation that would do the most to drive defossilisation.
What the study found
Hofmann and his colleagues invited more than 6,000 politicians at federal, state and regional level to a short survey, without revealing in advance that it was about the climate. Around a quarter responded — some 1,600 people, including many members of the Bundestag. In parallel, the same questions were put to a representative sample of the population, so the two pictures could be compared directly.
The result: politicians markedly underestimated the public’s awareness of climate-damaging behaviour and their willingness to act on it. Asked whether citizens would give up one per cent of their household income for climate protection, politicians guessed only about one in five would agree. In reality, roughly every second citizen said yes. The same pattern held for higher taxes on climate-damaging products and for new rules and laws — precisely the instruments that can move the needle. Only for soft measures such as information campaigns did the two groups roughly agree.
The misjudgement cut across all parties and across federal, state, regional and municipal levels. It was somewhat stronger the further right the party sat on the political spectrum, but no group escaped it.
The silent majority
Social psychologists call this effect “pluralistic ignorance”: people badly underestimate how much others support something. It is not limited to politicians. An international study of 130,000 people across 125 countries found that citizens themselves consistently underestimate how cooperative their neighbours are willing to be on climate. Strikingly, Hofmann’s work suggests politicians get it even more wrong than the public does.
Why? Those who back ambitious climate policy often wrongly believe they are in the minority, and so stay quiet. Meanwhile, politicians are disproportionately exposed to loud, organised voices — lobby groups and especially active opponents — which shape their sense of what “the public” wants far more than the larger but quieter majority.
Why this matters for Power-to-X
Power-to-X technologies — renewable hydrogen, e-fuels, e-SAF, e-methanol and the products built on recycled CO₂ — do not scale on engineering alone. They need framework conditions: carbon pricing that reflects the real cost of fossil emissions, binding quotas, and clear rules that create demand for defossilised molecules. These are exactly the kinds of taxes and regulation the study covers — and exactly where politicians most underestimate public support.
In other words, one of the strongest arguments used to slow ambitious policy — “the public doesn’t want it” — appears to be largely mistaken. The grassroots support for bolder action is already there and bigger than assumed. For the Power-to-X community, that is a quietly encouraging finding: the political ceiling on ambition may sit well below the actual willingness of the people that politics claims to represent.
There is also a lesson from history. Support for well-designed measures tends to rise quickly once they are in place — few people now object to smoke-free public spaces, and cities that add cleaner air and better cycling infrastructure usually win residents over fast. Sensible rules need not mean less freedom; by protecting the shared goods that concern us all, they can leave everyone better off.
The takeaway
The bottleneck is not public readiness — that is demonstrably greater than politics and the wider public assume. The task is to make the silent majority audible and to let behavioural evidence inform policy design. For Power-to-X, that means making the case for ambitious framework conditions with more confidence than the political mood music might suggest. The support is there to build on.
Based on an interview with Wilhelm Hofmann in Spektrum der Wissenschaft (originally published in DIE ZEIT), 28 June 2026.
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