If more serious climate protection measures are not implemented soon, court-proof climate policy will only become really difficult in a few years. The column.
Many citizens feel overwhelmed by climate protection measures. This is shown by the discussions of the past few months and the results of the most recent state elections. The high additional financial burden actually results from high inflation, rising rents and heating costs that have risen by 33 percent, primarily due to the war in Ukraine.
Instead, the direct burden on consumers caused by climate protection is comparatively low. The EEG levy on the price of electricity was completely eliminated by the traffic light government. The very high energy costs (diesel at 185 cents/liter, gasoline at 180 cents/liter, gas at 120 cents/cubic meter) are due to the CO2 tax (30 euros per tonne of CO2) – which, by the way, was still decided by the CDU/SPD government ) only accounts for around five percent. This cost share is also far more than compensated for by the energy price relief decided by the traffic light coalition. In addition, the cheap 49 euro ticket was introduced and the extremely high subsidization of flight prices and the company car privilege remained untouched.
Necessary stricter climate protection requirements are a long way off. New registrations of diesel cars and gasoline engines will only be banned from 2035. The combustion engines can then be used for another ten to 15 years. In the next few years, heating systems will only have to be replaced with more climate-friendly ones if they fail completely – with an announced subsidy of up to 70 percent of the costs. The government has postponed stricter building standards.
The fact that citizens feel “badly affected” by the extremely mild climate protection requirements is a communication disaster and a heavy burden for necessary and overdue climate protection measures. These will be postponed to the next few years and the next generation – completely contradicting the ruling of the Federal Constitutional Court in March 2021. The court had called for stricter climate protection legislation and justified this by saying that otherwise really drastic measures would have to be taken after 2030 that would violate civil liberties . According to the current legal status and the assessment of the traffic light coalition, the climate protection target will be exceeded by 200 million tons of CO2 in 2030. Judicial climate policy will then be really tough.
Rainer Grießhammer heads the Future Heritage Foundation and is an author.
2023-10-13 15:46:41
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