The COVID-19 crisis has kick-started new research on how pandemic policy – and especially restrictive policies related to “lockdowns” – affect political attitudes. However, we know little about the impact these restrictions on policy views, especially preferences for policies with similar public good problems such as the environment. We tackle these questions by focusing on the effect of recent pandemic regulations on environmental attitudes in Europe, where the management of COVID infections has varied across and within countries. Recent literature argues that lockdowns have nudged citizens to care more about the environment and have instilled a new interest in pro-environmental behavior. This paper proposes a different argument. We claim that stricter restrictions are less publicly appealing than previously argued; for environmental purposes, they make people less inclined to agree on adopting more environmental behaviors at the individual level. Meanwhile, they increase willingness to see governments taking a stronger line on environmental policy. To test our argument, we propose an analysis of attitudes towards environmental action at the individual and government level in Italy, France and the UK – three large European countries with similar subnational units of COVID management. Leveraging variation of lockdown `tiers’ and geolocated survey datasets, we show that harder forms of lockdown have (a) diffused environmental action concerns to higher governmental levels and (b) decreased willingness to individually invest in pro-environmental behavior. The evidence refocuses the implications of the pandemic for other distributive public policy realms, and highlights difficulties that COVID has imposed for environmental governance.