Green Vice-Chancellor and Climate Minister Robert Habeck launched a thinly-veiled attack on liberal FDP Transport Minister Volker Wissing after newly published data showed the country is not on track to meet its climate targets.
Data published by the Berlin-based think tank Agora Energiewende shows that Germany’s CO2 emissions are stagnating rather than falling and that the country overshot its maximum target of 756 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, registering a total of 761 million tonnes in 2022.
“Our problem child is the transport sector, where emissions increased again,” Habeck said in a statement published on Wednesday, adding that “all measures foreseen here so far are not sufficient to bridge the large CO2 gap.”
Earlier this week, the German parliamentary research service concluded that Wissing is violating Germany’s climate protection law by not taking sufficient measures to reach the emission reduction targets set out there. Last year, the expert-led Climate Council also concluded that Wissing’s climate protection plans fall behind government targets, even based on the ministry’s calculations.
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Habeck’s stab at Wissing comes after the liberal transport minister reopened the debate on extending the activity of nuclear power plants – an issue within Habeck’s area of responsibility on which the three governing parties had found a compromise only after Chancellor Scholz put down his foot, using his constitutional final say to resolve the dispute.
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Meanwhile, the youth climate movement Fridays for Future organised demonstrations in cities across Germany in response to the think tank report and to protest plans to evacuate and demolish the town of Lützerath in Western Germany to establish a new brown coal mine.
(Julia Dahm | EURACTIV.de)
Source: euractiv.com
