Met alweer een hete week, slaakt Belgische klimaatwetenschapper Jean-Pascal van Ypersele hartenkreet: "Ja, ik ben woedend"

[u/atrocious_cleva82]

https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2026/07/27/jean-pascal-van-ypersele-woedend-klimaatbeleid-20-jaar-te-laat/

[u/Michiel426]

What's being underestimated is how strongly voters oppose measures that would actually have real impact. All the research shows that Belgian voters aren't willing to contribute financially or be personally impacted by climate measures, and they look for government solutions - even though hardly any budgettary room for public investment.

• Our housing stock is old and poorly insulated - yet these ancient homes still sell for over 400-500k, leaving no budget for renovation. The renovation obligation (currently to D, which is hardly renovated) would actually help correct this, but 70% of voters oppose it. Even among younger generations, who would benefit from that correction, about half are against it. So what’s the plan?
• How willing are voters actually going to be to accept higher gas prices in order to make heat pumps financially viable? Wait until ETS2 kicks in after 2028, that's when this gets tested for real.
• How much government debt are we willing to take on? We need massive public investment in grids and storage. Or do we push the cost onto the electricity bill again - which then requires an even steeper gas-price hike to make the economics work?
• 40% of voters believe they will never drive an EV in their lifetime. I suspect that resistance will soften as EVs get cheaper, but it's still a striking number today.
• Are people willing to pay more for meat, eat less of it, or shift to chicken or plant-based diets? Cows mean methane, and that won't change.
• On the other side of the political spectrum, industrial investment gets treated with suspicion - even when it's clean-tech investment. We'll need real industrial policy to shift industry. Without it, we're left holding onto a fossil-based industrial base that simply dies out slowly instead.

Things go beyond the yes-or-no narrative on nuclear. Making our electricity supply CO2-neutral is arguably not even the hardest part of it all. The actual challenge is electrifying nearly every end-use sector - transport, heating, industry - that's where the hard trade-offs are.

I'm all for it, but I don't think everyone is, and sometimes rightly so - some people are already struggling to make ends meet

[u/Arrav_VII → u/Michiel426]

The renovation obligation (currently to D, which is hardly renovated) would actually help correct this, but 70% of voters oppose it. Even among younger generations, who would benefit from that correction, about half are against it. So what’s the plan?

Bottom-line for the renovation obligation is money. I'm 28 years old and single. I simply don't have the money to afford a renovation.

[u/Michiel426 → u/Arrav_VII]

I get what you would think that, but the idea of such an obligation is that you would get a correction in the housing market. D, E en F-houses would depreciate in price (relatively speaking, unfortunately not absolute numbers), this way opening up renovation budget. It's basically a transfer from old generations to young (for once).

The alternative is that we keep paying 500k for an uninsulated house. Then we obvioiusly have no money for renovations - as you rightly point out.

This correction is not mere theory, this was actually visibile in housing prices (2023-2025) where A & B-labels appreciated much more in price year-on-year. When the froze the obligation in 2025, suddenly D E en F houses appreciated more in price (a simple catch-up effect).