German env minister optimistic cabinet colleagues will subscribe to climate law plans

Germany’s environment minister Svenja Schulze is confident that the ministries relevant to the country’s greenhouse gas emissions record will eventually give up their resistance to the planned Climate Action Law and accept that they will have to come up with concrete emissions reduction measures still this year. “I think the transport commission will make some good proposals and that the buildings department will also deliver,” Schulze said in an interview with the newspaper Tageszeitung (taz). Schulze said the challenges her colleagues are facing are “not trivial” but “complex and difficult questions that cannot be solved by clicking your fingers.” She said it was important to make sure that climate-related policies do not put too great a burden on citizens who already struggle to make ends meet.
In an interview with the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper, transport minister Andreas Scheuer said climate action ranked “very high” on his list of priorities and that he would not call Germany’s international emissions reduction commitments into question. However, he added that “we cannot only look at the environment” when debating the future course of Germany’s transport sector, and that the first draft of Schulze’s law was unacceptable for him. “I’m against strict annual emissions reduction quotas for every ministry,” he said.

Reducing emissions in the transport sector is one of the major that the planned Climate Action Law is supposed to achieve. However, a meeting between leaders of the national commission tasked with proposing possible measures to reduce the sector’s carbon footprint and government representatives recently ended in a spat between commission members over basic principles of climate policy.