Germany’s parliament passes reform of climate emissions law

By Andreas Hoenig, dpa

 

The lower house of Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, has passed a controversial reform of the country’s Climate Protection Act, which will significantly overhaul how targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions are implemented.

The proposed changes have been deeply controversial, with some environmental groups sharply opposed to the changes. The opposition conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), also objected to the reforms, and unsuccessfully sued to delay Friday’s vote.

The upper house of parliament, the Bundesrat, will still have to consider the bill.

The reforms have been primarily pushed by the free-market liberal Free Democrats (FDP), the smallest member of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s three-party coalition government, which includes Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens.

But current law also sets CO2 emissions reduction targets by economic sector, such as housing or transport, and includes requirements that ministries prepare immediate action programmes if a sector falls short of achieving those targets.

Under the proposed reforms, however, compliance with the climate targets will no longer be monitored retrospectively by sector but will instead be forward-looking, multi-year and take multiple sectors as once.

Critics of the changes have complained that requirements which ensured accountability, such as placing specific responsibility with individual ministries, will be stripped from the law.

Last year, Germany’s transport and construction sectors missed targets.

Transport Minister Volker Wissing of the FDP warned that he would need to impose drastic measures such as nationwide weekend driving bans if he was forced to submit an action programme for the transport sector as required under current law.

He instead urged the German government to scrap the requirement as part of the overhaul of the Climate Protection Act.

The proposed changes passed by the Bundestag on Friday get rid of the sector-specific requirements, and would instead look at overall CO2 emissions in Germany and whether the country remained on track to achieve its climate commitments.

If it becomes clear in two consecutive years that the country is not on track to achieve its 2030 climate goals, then broader changes would be required.

Lawmaker Andreas Jung of the opposition CDU accused the government of gutting the very heart of the Climate Protection Act, and

The FDP’s Christian Dürr, however, defended the reforms as offering necessary flexibility and argued that it doesn’t matter for the climate whether CO2 reductions come from the energy, industrial or transport sectors.

Green parliamentary group leader Katharina Dröge said the law is now oriented toward the future, instead of basing action around past sector-by-sector emissions, and that climate targets remain unchanged.

However, Dröge conceded that the Greens would have liked the individual sectors to take even clearer responsibility.

Further climate targets enshrined in German law include reducing emissions by 88% by 2040 and achieving greenhouse gas neutrality by 2045, which would mean emitting no more CO2 than can be absorbed.