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Federal Environment Minister Svenja Schulze (SPD) calls for the CO2 costs to be shared between tenants and landlords.

The allocation of the new climate protection fee to the tenants should be limited to "a maximum of 50 percent", said the minister on Thursday in Berlin.

“From my point of view, that's the least that has to happen,” said Schulze.

One is in coordination with the other SPD-led ministries.

"We are putting pressure on and are also in discussion with the Union," said the minister.

Since the beginning of the year, German citizens have had to pay a new fee for the use of fossil fuels - initially 25 euros per tonne of carbon dioxide emitted.

The tax will rise to 55 euros by 2025.

Families with children have additional costs in the three-digit range

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Converted to one liter of gasoline or heating oil, that is around seven cents, and around 0.6 cents for a kilowatt hour of gas.

In the case of heating, landlords can pass on the due tax on heating oil and gas to their tenants.

For families with children, this results in additional costs in the three-digit range, as example calculations by the Ministry of the Environment show.

From the point of view of some SPD-led ministries and the German Tenants' Association (DMB), this is an unjust burden-sharing.

The possibility of passing the costs on to the tenants should therefore be limited, said Schulze.

"Tenants usually have no influence on the degree of renovation of the house in which they live," the minister justified the renewed approach on the subject.

"You can't just replace the heating system in your home."

Source: WORLD infographic

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However, the CO2 tax is also intended as an incentive to invest in climate-friendly technologies, said Schulze.

But if landlords didn't notice anything, this incentive would come to nothing.

A partial ban on levies could therefore "generate an enormous investment boost."

According to calculations by the Federal Ministry for the Environment, a family with two children pays around 96 euros per year for the new fee with average heating consumption.

A single pensioner in the country has to reckon with a tax of around 90 euros in a typical living situation, while student households will have to pay around 56 euros.

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In poorly insulated houses with old heating systems, the tax is likely to be even higher, and by 2025 the amounts will more than double.

"Landlords must be encouraged to change direction," said the President of the German Tenants' Association, Lukas Siebenkotten.

"We would therefore have been in favor of banning the levy completely."

The SPD parliamentary group also brings a levy ban into play.

"The SPD parliamentary group considers the assumption of the additional costs from the CO2 pricing by landlords to be the ecologically correct and most socially fair solution," says a paper for a closed meeting beginning on Thursday, from which the editorial network Germany (RND) quoted .

The Green parliamentary group also spoke up: "The CO2 price must be used in such a way that it is also worth investing for investors and landlords," said Chris Kühn, spokesman for housing policy.

Environment Minister Svenja Schulze emphasized that the CO2 tax is not about generating higher revenues for the state.

It's about an investment incentive.

"Those who behave in a climate-friendly manner in the future will be rewarded," said the minister.

Since the beginning of the year, the renewable energy surcharge on the electricity price has been capped at 6.5 cents to balance the burden, and there are cheaper prices for rail and local public transport in the transport sector.

E-cars would also be promoted.

Here, the consumer can decide whether to switch to a more climate-friendly alternative - this is not possible with living.

In the Union, however, the SPD-led minister, the SPD parliamentary group and the tenants' association are likely to bite granite, as they have done in recent months.

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Jan-Marco Luczak, spokesman for law and consumer protection of the CDU / CSU parliamentary group, sees a “fundamental breach of the polluter pays principle”: “Landlords have no influence on the consumption behavior of tenants, but they should still pay for it.

That is neither fair nor just.

On the contrary, this would even reward climate-damaging user behavior. "

The reasoning behind this: Even if a landlord offers a perfectly insulated house with modern heating, tenants can still turn the heating on fully and open the windows.

This is also how the owners' association Haus & Grund sees it.

“The CO2 emissions during heating are significantly influenced by consumption behavior.

As a result, the CO2 price must also reach the tenants, ”says Association President Kai Warnecke.

Practice shows time and again that after energy modernization, more instead of less is heated.

“The users simply have the impression that they could then afford more comfortable temperatures.

The landlord is therefore the wrong addressee in order to bring about behavioral changes by means of CO2 prices, ”Warnecke points out.

The housing industry wants a compromise

For tenants' association president Siebenkotten, this is not a conclusive argument, since tenants would still have to pay the heating bills in the end and therefore would have an interest in not wasting heat.

The umbrella association of the housing industry GdW, whose member companies rent around six million apartments in Germany, is also against a division of the CO2 tax.

However, the association proposes a kind of compromise in which landlords who invest in climate protection are also rewarded: "In energy-efficient buildings - specifically residential buildings with efficiency classes A + to C - the users have to pay the CO2 price," says the GdW -Proposal - so the tenants.

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"Because in these buildings, the energy requirement due to the renovation is already so low that the individual heating energy consumption by the user in the respective apartment has a considerable influence," the GdW continues.

In energetically poor buildings, however, the landlord would then participate in the fee, as the SPD and the tenants' association propose.

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