Environment Minister Svenja Schulze wants to make other ministries more responsible when it comes to complying with German climate protection goals. This emerges from a draft for a new climate protection law, which the SPD-led house has submitted to the chancellery.
The paper, which is also available to SPIEGEL, presents a twofold intensification compared to the so-called climate protection plan of the Federal Government:
Firstly, significantly stronger CO2 reduction targets should be set for individual economic sectors such as industry, transport or agriculture.
So far, there has been room for the amount of carbon dioxide that will save each sector by 2030. This has now been canceled. According to the Ministry of the Environment, the strictest CO2 targets should now apply. The specifications at a glance:
| CO2 target per sector | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 | 2027 | 2028 | 2029 | 2030 |
| energy | 257 | 175 | ||||||||
| Industry | 182 | 177 | 172 | 168 | 163 | 158 | 154 | 149 | 145 | 140 |
| building | 113 | 108 | 103 | 99 | 94 | 89 | 84 | 80 | 75 | 70 |
| traffic | 145 | 139 | 134 | 128 | 123 | 117 | 112 | 106 | 101 | 95 |
| agricultural | 68 | 67 | 66 | 65 | 64 | 63 | 61 | 60 | 59 | 58 |
| miscellaneous | 9 | 8th | 8th | 7 | 7 | 7 | 6 | 6 | 5 | 5 |
* Annual emission volume in million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, source: BMU
Secondly, the Ministry of the Environment also wants to make other government departments more responsible. If the Federal Republic fails to meet its European obligations when it comes to cutting CO2 emissions, the federal government may incur costs, for example because additional CO2 emission certificates would have to be purchased.
According to the bill, these expenditures are to be estimated "proportionally according to the degree of non-compliance" in the budgets of the responsible federal ministries. If, for example, the transport sector misses its targets, then the Ministry of Transport would have to pay. In the agricultural sector, it would be mainly the Ministry of Agriculture.
In this way, the pressure should increase that the government is disciplined in climate protection. Inactivity would suddenly be expensive, would have consequences for the budget.
"Planned economic regime"
In addition, the specialist ministers should submit programs of measures for their area, which are approved by the Federal Government. If a sector misses its target, the federal government should decide on an emergency program within six months, which in turn will be implemented within six months.
Finally, in order to monitor progress in climate protection, the Bundestag is to nominate a seven-member "Expert Panel on Climate Issues", which among other things will examine the effectiveness of the planned climate protection measures.
Against the plans of the Minister of the Environment had last great protest excited. Last week, the Union demanded that the draft bill be postponed until reservations were cleared. Schulze has now ignored this request.
The reactions are correspondingly different. "I can not imagine that this law survives the referendum," said the CSU politician Georg Nüßlein, the "Süddeutsche Zeitung". It is a planned economic regime that goes beyond any departmental responsibility.
The opposition, on the other hand, praises the design. "This is for the first time a real climate-regulatory law instead of non-binding rubber paragraphs," says, for example, Lorenz Gösta Beutin, energy and climate politicians of the left in the Bundestag. "The Left in the Bundestag offers Minister of the Environment Schulze and its Climate Protection Act in its present form the full support."