All eyes were on Washington, D.C. yesterday. From a climate perspective at least, the day was reminiscent of “Groundhog Day,” because for the USA it brought another withdrawal from the Paris Agreement – and global attention, the elixir of life for the avowed climate denier, enemy of renewables and demolition contractor of US democracy, Donald Trump. We can’t escape it either. Today, we’ll look at the details and background, and shed light on what the announced withdrawal of the USA from global responsibility means – for the USA, but also for global climate policy.
In Germany, the problems are one size smaller but still crucial: On the occasion of the Green Week, we write about the competition for good soil between farmers, nature conservation and climate action – and show ways in which these demands can be reconciled. And because everyone here is eagerly awaiting the Bundestag elections, we continue with our fact check on energy and climate policy. Today we have the hot topic of recent years for you: The use of heat pumps and the idea of heating with supposedly “green oil.” We analyze how realistic the proposal is.
Don’t forget: Global emissions must fall rapidly by 2030 if global warming is not to get completely out of hand. Despite the headwinds in Washington and Berlin, the climate issue needs as much attention as possible over the next four years.
US President Donald Trump is once again directing the USA towards largely turning its back on national and international climate action. Immediately after his inauguration as the 47th POTUS on Monday afternoon local time in Washington, D.C., the White House declared, among many other “first” priorities, “President Trump will withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement.” This means that the USA is once again changing from a country that is seriously striving for climate action and a climate-neutral restructuring of the economy to a state that favors fossil fuels and industries.
This new US position weakens the climate protection camp internationally and strengthens the front of petro-states such as Russia, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and other oil and gas producers. According to the White House, Trump wants to put an end to the “climate extremism” of his predecessor and
The announcement was widely expected. It means that the USA will no longer be part of the agreement one year after the official announcement of its withdrawal from the agreement at the UN Climate Change Secretariat – which has not yet taken place. At the next COP30 in Belém, Brazil, however, it will still be a full member of the conference.
The head of UN Climate Change, Simon Stiell, told Table.Briefings: “The global clean energy boom, which was worth two trillion dollars last year alone and is rising fast, is the economic growth deal of the decade.” Those who participate in it can expect “massive profits, millions of industrial jobs, and clean air.” Those who ignore it are “sending these vast riches to economic competitors, while climate disasters such as droughts, wildfires, and superstorms only get worse”. For the USA, says Stiell, “the door to the Paris Agreement remains open.”
It is unclear what the announcement means for US climate and energy policy in concrete terms. Many Democrat-governed US states and cities want to stick to their climate plans, as does a large part of the industry. Whether there will be new gas and oil drilling is just as unclear as the fate of the multi-billion investment program IRA, which benefits many rural areas. Just like the climate plans of the Obama and Biden administrations, Trump’s U-turn in many areas will be challenged and delayed by court cases. Government agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are also said to be prepared to slow down the reversal of their work.
There was no talk of the USA withdrawing from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which the Trump camp had also considered, on the first day in office. Such a withdrawal would have far greater consequences, and would also release the USA from all financial obligations, but would potentially be difficult to implement legally. It is unclear among legal experts in the USA whether a majority in the US Congress would be required for this.
In the US, Trump’s departure from climate policy is meeting a prepared counter-front. An alliance of 5,000 stakeholders from companies, states, cities, universities, and institutions wants to continue to drive forward US climate action with the “America is all in” alliance, as it did during Trump’s first term in office. States such as California want to maintain their progressive laws on CO2 standards for cars, for example, and a large proportion of the funds from the IRA infrastructure program have already been spent and three-quarters of them have been planned in Republican-governed states. Even without help from the US federal government, the USA can achieve a 48 percent reduction in emissions by 2035. However, this is a far cry from the 61 to 66 percent reduction that the Biden administration’s NDC had just announced.
By withdrawing from the agreement, the Trump administration is putting its country in the same league as Iran, Libya, and Yemen, which are also not part of the Paris Agreement. Unlike the USA, even North Korea is now one of the 194 countries and the EU that have committed to climate plans, emissions reductions, and financial solidarity as parties to the agreement. At the COP29 in Baku, even Russia, as one of the brakemen in the process, had advised the USA to remain in the agreement. And the CEO of the oil company Exxon also campaigned for the USA to remain in the Paris Agreement.
The USA’s departure from “Paris” is also exacerbating the UN Climate Change Secretariat’s financial problems. To date, the USA has accounted for around a quarter of the UN Climate Change budget – around USD 20 million a year. The UN statistics show that the Biden administration quickly paid off the US’s historic arrears before the end of its term of office. In any case, the Climate Change Secretariat is suffering from being assigned more and more tasks by the UN states, but not a correspondingly higher budget. In the draft budget for 2026/27, which will be debated this summer, either the other states would have to compensate for the USA’s share – or the work of the UN agency would be reduced. Even if private donors were to step in, they would not be able to contribute to UN Climate Change’s 74 million “core budget.”
It may even be more rational for a US government that wants to slow down the climate process to remain in the agreement and disrupt it “from within” – as Saudi Arabia or Russia, for example, have been doing for decades, sometimes very effectively. After the withdrawal, the USA will lose its right to vote in the UN negotiations under the Paris Agreement in a year’s time – i.e. on all important issues at a COP. According to the UN, the country will then be given “observer” status – it can then comment on certain issues like other observers (environmental groups, representatives of civil society), but will no longer have an official say in setting the agenda. US representatives are also no longer allowed to succeed US representatives on international climate committees, such as the Green Climate Fund or the Loss and Damage Fund, once their term of office has ended. Overall, the USA’s influence on international climate policy is dwindling – and the relative weight of its rival China is increasing, according to many experts.
However, the Trump administration is hardly pursuing a rational policy on this issue. While the accusation that the Paris Agreement puts the USA at a disadvantage is hardly tenable, the propagated “energy dominance” through increased oil and gas drilling is just as questionable. The USA is already the world’s largest oil and gas producer and global demand is stagnating rather than increasing. The US energy industry is threatening to create expensive fossil fuel overcapacity: An oil auction round in Alaska last year yielded no bids. Demand for gas in Europe will fall in the medium term. The new LNG terminals planned to date on the south coast of the USA will already double export capacities in the next few years. Biden’s ban on the construction of new LNG terminals in the USA, which Trump now wants to lift, could, like his ban on new drilling on public land, protect the industry from expensive bad investments.
The USA is the only country so far to have joined the Paris Agreement twice and withdrawn twice. Similar to the Kyoto Protocol, the historically biggest polluter is thus leaving a treaty that it itself helped to shape through diplomatic lobbying and strongly influenced in its favor. Many of the rules on transparency, as well as the exclusion of liability for climate damage, are the result of pressure from the USA. Many emerging and developing countries criticize the dominance of the USA in these negotiations – exactly contrary to the view of Trump and the US Republicans that the Paris Agreement is “unfair to the USA” and favors China.
Both the CDU/CSU and the FDP want to reverse the most recent amendment to the Building Energy Act (also known to the public as the “Heating Act”). They criticize the fact that it focuses primarily on heat pumps and district heating and discriminates against other types of heating.
Instead of defining exactly which new heating systems may be installed in the future, the decarbonization of the building sector is to take place primarily via the CO2 price, which will gradually make heating with fossil fuels more expensive. Even oil heating systems, which should only be permitted in exceptional cases from 2026 under the grand coalition’s old Heating Act, should have a future if the CDU/CSU have their way: They could become climate-friendly via a quota for “green heating oil,” according to the CDU/CSU’s joint election manifesto. Jens Spahn, a member of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, recently promoted this demand at the Heat Pump Forum, much to the annoyance of the heat pump industry.
In fact, the Heating Act would not even have to be amended to implement the Union’s demand, because at least in theory, the installation of new oil heating systems is also possible under the current rules. “The compliance options provided for by the current act also provide for solutions for heating oil customers,” says Ernst-Moritz Bellingen, Head of the Heating Market at En2X, the former mineral oil association that is now called the Fuels and Energy trade association. This is possible by combining an oil heating system with a heat pump or by “using a fuel with a corresponding renewable share” – in other words, what the Union calls “green oil.”
However, it is questionable whether this will happen in practice under the current law: When the law comes into full force after the completion of municipal heating planning from mid-2026 (in large cities) or mid-2028 (in smaller towns), new oil and gas heating systems will have to be at least 65% climate-neutral after a transitional period of five years. And climate-friendly heating oil, which would meet this requirement, is currently hardly available and significantly more expensive than fossil fuels. It is therefore also conceivable that the Union could set a lower quota than the one previously envisaged or set longer deadlines.
The impact of an amendment to the act and the introduction of a quota for “green heating oil” would depend heavily on how high this would be and what exactly the Union understands by this. This is because there are various products that can replace fossil heating oil and have very different properties:
No matter which technology is used: Climate-friendly fuels are likely to be more expensive for customers than fossil heating oil in any case. More importantly, however, they would be of little benefit to the climate, at least for the foreseeable future. The reason for this is their limited availability: Both biodiesel from energy crops and HVO from old cooking oils and fat waste require raw materials that are not available in unlimited quantities.
And even if an expansion were to succeed – for example through an even greater use of waste materials and the increased cultivation of energy crops – there is likely to be strong competition. This is because the transport sector is also currently relying primarily on HVO and, in the future, PtL fuels for decarbonization. This not only applies to road transport, where HVO is to be used to achieve the GHG quota. In aviation, the EU stipulates that six percent of kerosene must be produced sustainably by 2030; the majority of this is to be covered by HVO, which will greatly increase the demand for this scarce commodity. Last year, the Bundestag’s scientific services warned that the available quantity “will not be sufficient in the long term to comprehensively decarbonize the transport sector.”
Electricity-based PtL fuels, on the other hand, can theoretically be produced in larger quantities. However, according to the aviation association BDL, they are not an alternative to meeting the EU quotas, at least not in the foreseeable future: Their availability is “effectively non-existent,” the association writes. And: “A timely market ramp-up is also not foreseeable at present.”
Because the total quantity of climate-friendly fuels is limited, the UBA believes that it only makes sense to use them where there is currently no alternative – such as in air and sea transport. Burning them in oil heating systems, on the other hand, does nothing for the climate. “Everything that is used for heating would be missing in the transport sector,” says efficiency expert Schubert.
This would not only be a problem for Germany’s climate footprint but also for the national budget. Even though the sector targets in the German Climate Protection Act are no longer binding since the recent amendment, the EU continues to set its member states specific climate targets for the individual sectors. Germany has recently failed to meet these targets in both the building and transport sectors. If this remains the case, the German government will either have to pay fines or buy emission allowances from other member states that exceed their targets. This would be “a budget risk worth billions,” warns Agora Director Müller.
Reversing the amendment to the Building Energy Act is likely to be difficult to implement in reality. Of the CDU/CSU’s potential coalition partners, only the FDP shares this demand. But even if the FDP were to re-enter the Bundestag, all the polls suggest that the CDU/CSU and FDP would not have a majority. And the SPD or the Greens, with whom the CDU/CSU could achieve a government majority, want to stick to the amended GEG in principle – also because there is hardly any other way of achieving the climate targets in the building sector, at least to some extent.
The Union’s call to rely more on “green oil” for heating is not very realistic. Because more climate-friendly fuels will only be available to a very limited extent in the foreseeable future and are also more urgently needed in the transport sector, the prices for them are likely to be so high that oil-only heating systems are hardly attractive compared to other climate-friendly heating systems.
In addition, it would hardly benefit the climate as a whole because the quantities of more climate-friendly fuels used for heating would be lacking in other sectors such as aviation. This would not only jeopardize the achievement of climate targets but would also pose a high risk to the national budget due to the possibility of missing EU targets.
In the debates about the climate crisis, species extinction, and sustainable agriculture, which are once again taking place at the Green Week, one factor is often overlooked: competition for land. Fields and pastures are the basis of every agricultural business. At the same time, land is the basis of existence for all citizens: a common good.
This non-renewable resource is hotly contested. It is needed for the expansion of renewable energies, for nature conservation and agriculture, for residential and transportation areas, and for urban and rural development. More and more often, green is pitted against green when it comes to the old questions: Who owns the land, and who is allowed to use it for what? But there are also ideas to defuse the conflicts.
What‘s more, the soil is not healthy either, but compacted in many places, damaged by agricultural poisons, depleted, and dried out. Yet the diversity of organisms in the soil is important for a healthy diet, biodiversity on the surface and also for more climate action. The livelier the soil is, the better it builds up humus, stores carbon, cools, cleans and seeps away water, and mitigates flood disasters.
Competition is causing land prices to rise continuously. Over the past twelve years, prices for agricultural land have doubled in western Germany and in some cases more than quadrupled in eastern Germany. In 2021 alone, they rose by an average of 10.3 percent to EUR 29,545 per hectare. In 2023, it was already EUR 33,400.
Many factors determine how high land prices climb, but in some regions, the energy transition plays a central role. In the case of ground-mounted photovoltaic systems, for example, investors are expecting such high returns that they are putting exorbitant purchase or lease prices on the table. Family farms are often no longer able to keep up. The demise of farms is accelerating.
However, investors “often do not see it as a priority” to promote biodiversity and soil fertility, according to a 2021 report by the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN), “as these long-term investments do not promise short-term returns.” In addition, the increase in short leases easily promotes a “focus on maximum yields” and thus “highly intensive land management” – also to the detriment of the climate.
There are many political levers available to solve the complex land problem.
Above all, however, citizens and experts from the various sectors must talk to each other more at the regional level, learn from each other, and find multifunctional solutions together: This became clear at the Federal Environment Ministry’s agricultural congress a few days ago. New committees could be created for this purpose, but spatial planning could also be strengthened financially and in terms of personnel.
Species conservation, climate action, the agricultural turnaround, and climate-friendly cities would all have to be taken into account: “If you don’t forget the idea, you can make the right decisions,” said Claudia Bönnighausen, nature conservation expert for the state government of Schleswig-Holstein. And she spoke of “great work.”
Editor’s note: In an earlier version of the text, it was mistakenly stated that moors need to be “drained to store CO2.” Of course, the opposite is true – moors need to be re-wetted. We have corrected the error.
All eyes were on Washington, D.C. yesterday. From a climate perspective at least, the day was reminiscent of “Groundhog Day,” because for the USA it brought another withdrawal from the Paris Agreement – and global attention, the elixir of life for the avowed climate denier, enemy of renewables and demolition contractor of US democracy, Donald Trump. We can’t escape it either. Today, we’ll look at the details and background, and shed light on what the announced withdrawal of the USA from global responsibility means – for the USA, but also for global climate policy.
In Germany, the problems are one size smaller but still crucial: On the occasion of the Green Week, we write about the competition for good soil between farmers, nature conservation and climate action – and show ways in which these demands can be reconciled. And because everyone here is eagerly awaiting the Bundestag elections, we continue with our fact check on energy and climate policy. Today we have the hot topic of recent years for you: The use of heat pumps and the idea of heating with supposedly “green oil.” We analyze how realistic the proposal is.
Don’t forget: Global emissions must fall rapidly by 2030 if global warming is not to get completely out of hand. Despite the headwinds in Washington and Berlin, the climate issue needs as much attention as possible over the next four years.
US President Donald Trump is once again directing the USA towards largely turning its back on national and international climate action. Immediately after his inauguration as the 47th POTUS on Monday afternoon local time in Washington, D.C., the White House declared, among many other “first” priorities, “President Trump will withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement.” This means that the USA is once again changing from a country that is seriously striving for climate action and a climate-neutral restructuring of the economy to a state that favors fossil fuels and industries.
This new US position weakens the climate protection camp internationally and strengthens the front of petro-states such as Russia, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and other oil and gas producers. According to the White House, Trump wants to put an end to the “climate extremism” of his predecessor and
The announcement was widely expected. It means that the USA will no longer be part of the agreement one year after the official announcement of its withdrawal from the agreement at the UN Climate Change Secretariat – which has not yet taken place. At the next COP30 in Belém, Brazil, however, it will still be a full member of the conference.
The head of UN Climate Change, Simon Stiell, told Table.Briefings: “The global clean energy boom, which was worth two trillion dollars last year alone and is rising fast, is the economic growth deal of the decade.” Those who participate in it can expect “massive profits, millions of industrial jobs, and clean air.” Those who ignore it are “sending these vast riches to economic competitors, while climate disasters such as droughts, wildfires, and superstorms only get worse”. For the USA, says Stiell, “the door to the Paris Agreement remains open.”
It is unclear what the announcement means for US climate and energy policy in concrete terms. Many Democrat-governed US states and cities want to stick to their climate plans, as does a large part of the industry. Whether there will be new gas and oil drilling is just as unclear as the fate of the multi-billion investment program IRA, which benefits many rural areas. Just like the climate plans of the Obama and Biden administrations, Trump’s U-turn in many areas will be challenged and delayed by court cases. Government agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are also said to be prepared to slow down the reversal of their work.
There was no talk of the USA withdrawing from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which the Trump camp had also considered, on the first day in office. Such a withdrawal would have far greater consequences, and would also release the USA from all financial obligations, but would potentially be difficult to implement legally. It is unclear among legal experts in the USA whether a majority in the US Congress would be required for this.
In the US, Trump’s departure from climate policy is meeting a prepared counter-front. An alliance of 5,000 stakeholders from companies, states, cities, universities, and institutions wants to continue to drive forward US climate action with the “America is all in” alliance, as it did during Trump’s first term in office. States such as California want to maintain their progressive laws on CO2 standards for cars, for example, and a large proportion of the funds from the IRA infrastructure program have already been spent and three-quarters of them have been planned in Republican-governed states. Even without help from the US federal government, the USA can achieve a 48 percent reduction in emissions by 2035. However, this is a far cry from the 61 to 66 percent reduction that the Biden administration’s NDC had just announced.
By withdrawing from the agreement, the Trump administration is putting its country in the same league as Iran, Libya, and Yemen, which are also not part of the Paris Agreement. Unlike the USA, even North Korea is now one of the 194 countries and the EU that have committed to climate plans, emissions reductions, and financial solidarity as parties to the agreement. At the COP29 in Baku, even Russia, as one of the brakemen in the process, had advised the USA to remain in the agreement. And the CEO of the oil company Exxon also campaigned for the USA to remain in the Paris Agreement.
The USA’s departure from “Paris” is also exacerbating the UN Climate Change Secretariat’s financial problems. To date, the USA has accounted for around a quarter of the UN Climate Change budget – around USD 20 million a year. The UN statistics show that the Biden administration quickly paid off the US’s historic arrears before the end of its term of office. In any case, the Climate Change Secretariat is suffering from being assigned more and more tasks by the UN states, but not a correspondingly higher budget. In the draft budget for 2026/27, which will be debated this summer, either the other states would have to compensate for the USA’s share – or the work of the UN agency would be reduced. Even if private donors were to step in, they would not be able to contribute to UN Climate Change’s 74 million “core budget.”
It may even be more rational for a US government that wants to slow down the climate process to remain in the agreement and disrupt it “from within” – as Saudi Arabia or Russia, for example, have been doing for decades, sometimes very effectively. After the withdrawal, the USA will lose its right to vote in the UN negotiations under the Paris Agreement in a year’s time – i.e. on all important issues at a COP. According to the UN, the country will then be given “observer” status – it can then comment on certain issues like other observers (environmental groups, representatives of civil society), but will no longer have an official say in setting the agenda. US representatives are also no longer allowed to succeed US representatives on international climate committees, such as the Green Climate Fund or the Loss and Damage Fund, once their term of office has ended. Overall, the USA’s influence on international climate policy is dwindling – and the relative weight of its rival China is increasing, according to many experts.
However, the Trump administration is hardly pursuing a rational policy on this issue. While the accusation that the Paris Agreement puts the USA at a disadvantage is hardly tenable, the propagated “energy dominance” through increased oil and gas drilling is just as questionable. The USA is already the world’s largest oil and gas producer and global demand is stagnating rather than increasing. The US energy industry is threatening to create expensive fossil fuel overcapacity: An oil auction round in Alaska last year yielded no bids. Demand for gas in Europe will fall in the medium term. The new LNG terminals planned to date on the south coast of the USA will already double export capacities in the next few years. Biden’s ban on the construction of new LNG terminals in the USA, which Trump now wants to lift, could, like his ban on new drilling on public land, protect the industry from expensive bad investments.
The USA is the only country so far to have joined the Paris Agreement twice and withdrawn twice. Similar to the Kyoto Protocol, the historically biggest polluter is thus leaving a treaty that it itself helped to shape through diplomatic lobbying and strongly influenced in its favor. Many of the rules on transparency, as well as the exclusion of liability for climate damage, are the result of pressure from the USA. Many emerging and developing countries criticize the dominance of the USA in these negotiations – exactly contrary to the view of Trump and the US Republicans that the Paris Agreement is “unfair to the USA” and favors China.
Both the CDU/CSU and the FDP want to reverse the most recent amendment to the Building Energy Act (also known to the public as the “Heating Act”). They criticize the fact that it focuses primarily on heat pumps and district heating and discriminates against other types of heating.
Instead of defining exactly which new heating systems may be installed in the future, the decarbonization of the building sector is to take place primarily via the CO2 price, which will gradually make heating with fossil fuels more expensive. Even oil heating systems, which should only be permitted in exceptional cases from 2026 under the grand coalition’s old Heating Act, should have a future if the CDU/CSU have their way: They could become climate-friendly via a quota for “green heating oil,” according to the CDU/CSU’s joint election manifesto. Jens Spahn, a member of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, recently promoted this demand at the Heat Pump Forum, much to the annoyance of the heat pump industry.
In fact, the Heating Act would not even have to be amended to implement the Union’s demand, because at least in theory, the installation of new oil heating systems is also possible under the current rules. “The compliance options provided for by the current act also provide for solutions for heating oil customers,” says Ernst-Moritz Bellingen, Head of the Heating Market at En2X, the former mineral oil association that is now called the Fuels and Energy trade association. This is possible by combining an oil heating system with a heat pump or by “using a fuel with a corresponding renewable share” – in other words, what the Union calls “green oil.”
However, it is questionable whether this will happen in practice under the current law: When the law comes into full force after the completion of municipal heating planning from mid-2026 (in large cities) or mid-2028 (in smaller towns), new oil and gas heating systems will have to be at least 65% climate-neutral after a transitional period of five years. And climate-friendly heating oil, which would meet this requirement, is currently hardly available and significantly more expensive than fossil fuels. It is therefore also conceivable that the Union could set a lower quota than the one previously envisaged or set longer deadlines.
The impact of an amendment to the act and the introduction of a quota for “green heating oil” would depend heavily on how high this would be and what exactly the Union understands by this. This is because there are various products that can replace fossil heating oil and have very different properties:
No matter which technology is used: Climate-friendly fuels are likely to be more expensive for customers than fossil heating oil in any case. More importantly, however, they would be of little benefit to the climate, at least for the foreseeable future. The reason for this is their limited availability: Both biodiesel from energy crops and HVO from old cooking oils and fat waste require raw materials that are not available in unlimited quantities.
And even if an expansion were to succeed – for example through an even greater use of waste materials and the increased cultivation of energy crops – there is likely to be strong competition. This is because the transport sector is also currently relying primarily on HVO and, in the future, PtL fuels for decarbonization. This not only applies to road transport, where HVO is to be used to achieve the GHG quota. In aviation, the EU stipulates that six percent of kerosene must be produced sustainably by 2030; the majority of this is to be covered by HVO, which will greatly increase the demand for this scarce commodity. Last year, the Bundestag’s scientific services warned that the available quantity “will not be sufficient in the long term to comprehensively decarbonize the transport sector.”
Electricity-based PtL fuels, on the other hand, can theoretically be produced in larger quantities. However, according to the aviation association BDL, they are not an alternative to meeting the EU quotas, at least not in the foreseeable future: Their availability is “effectively non-existent,” the association writes. And: “A timely market ramp-up is also not foreseeable at present.”
Because the total quantity of climate-friendly fuels is limited, the UBA believes that it only makes sense to use them where there is currently no alternative – such as in air and sea transport. Burning them in oil heating systems, on the other hand, does nothing for the climate. “Everything that is used for heating would be missing in the transport sector,” says efficiency expert Schubert.
This would not only be a problem for Germany’s climate footprint but also for the national budget. Even though the sector targets in the German Climate Protection Act are no longer binding since the recent amendment, the EU continues to set its member states specific climate targets for the individual sectors. Germany has recently failed to meet these targets in both the building and transport sectors. If this remains the case, the German government will either have to pay fines or buy emission allowances from other member states that exceed their targets. This would be “a budget risk worth billions,” warns Agora Director Müller.
Reversing the amendment to the Building Energy Act is likely to be difficult to implement in reality. Of the CDU/CSU’s potential coalition partners, only the FDP shares this demand. But even if the FDP were to re-enter the Bundestag, all the polls suggest that the CDU/CSU and FDP would not have a majority. And the SPD or the Greens, with whom the CDU/CSU could achieve a government majority, want to stick to the amended GEG in principle – also because there is hardly any other way of achieving the climate targets in the building sector, at least to some extent.
The Union’s call to rely more on “green oil” for heating is not very realistic. Because more climate-friendly fuels will only be available to a very limited extent in the foreseeable future and are also more urgently needed in the transport sector, the prices for them are likely to be so high that oil-only heating systems are hardly attractive compared to other climate-friendly heating systems.
In addition, it would hardly benefit the climate as a whole because the quantities of more climate-friendly fuels used for heating would be lacking in other sectors such as aviation. This would not only jeopardize the achievement of climate targets but would also pose a high risk to the national budget due to the possibility of missing EU targets.
In the debates about the climate crisis, species extinction, and sustainable agriculture, which are once again taking place at the Green Week, one factor is often overlooked: competition for land. Fields and pastures are the basis of every agricultural business. At the same time, land is the basis of existence for all citizens: a common good.
This non-renewable resource is hotly contested. It is needed for the expansion of renewable energies, for nature conservation and agriculture, for residential and transportation areas, and for urban and rural development. More and more often, green is pitted against green when it comes to the old questions: Who owns the land, and who is allowed to use it for what? But there are also ideas to defuse the conflicts.
What‘s more, the soil is not healthy either, but compacted in many places, damaged by agricultural poisons, depleted, and dried out. Yet the diversity of organisms in the soil is important for a healthy diet, biodiversity on the surface and also for more climate action. The livelier the soil is, the better it builds up humus, stores carbon, cools, cleans and seeps away water, and mitigates flood disasters.
Competition is causing land prices to rise continuously. Over the past twelve years, prices for agricultural land have doubled in western Germany and in some cases more than quadrupled in eastern Germany. In 2021 alone, they rose by an average of 10.3 percent to EUR 29,545 per hectare. In 2023, it was already EUR 33,400.
Many factors determine how high land prices climb, but in some regions, the energy transition plays a central role. In the case of ground-mounted photovoltaic systems, for example, investors are expecting such high returns that they are putting exorbitant purchase or lease prices on the table. Family farms are often no longer able to keep up. The demise of farms is accelerating.
However, investors “often do not see it as a priority” to promote biodiversity and soil fertility, according to a 2021 report by the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN), “as these long-term investments do not promise short-term returns.” In addition, the increase in short leases easily promotes a “focus on maximum yields” and thus “highly intensive land management” – also to the detriment of the climate.
There are many political levers available to solve the complex land problem.
Above all, however, citizens and experts from the various sectors must talk to each other more at the regional level, learn from each other, and find multifunctional solutions together: This became clear at the Federal Environment Ministry’s agricultural congress a few days ago. New committees could be created for this purpose, but spatial planning could also be strengthened financially and in terms of personnel.
Species conservation, climate action, the agricultural turnaround, and climate-friendly cities would all have to be taken into account: “If you don’t forget the idea, you can make the right decisions,” said Claudia Bönnighausen, nature conservation expert for the state government of Schleswig-Holstein. And she spoke of “great work.”
Editor’s note: In an earlier version of the text, it was mistakenly stated that moors need to be “drained to store CO2.” Of course, the opposite is true – moors need to be re-wetted. We have corrected the error.
