Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung
Osnabruck (ots)
Municipalities criticize Habeck’s heat transition plan as “unrealistic”
City and Municipal Association boss Landsberg: Exceptions for over 80-year-olds are constitutionally questionable – people’s uncertainty could stall climate commitment
Osnabruck. The German Association of Towns and Municipalities (DStGB) has criticized the traffic light draft law for the gradual phasing out of gas and oil heating as “unrealistic”. The heat transition is necessary to achieve the climate protection goals and the direction is right, said DStGB chief executive Gerd Landsberg in an interview with the “Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung” (NOZ). The announcement to promote the installation of heat pumps and climate-friendly alternatives is also correct. “But unfortunately that’s not backed up with realistic figures,” says Landsberg. There is also a lack of an exact determination of the sum of the affected buildings, the craft capacities and the costs. “Without this analysis, people will only be unsettled when in doubt,” warned the DStGB chief executive. “And the necessary commitment to climate protection, including through our own measures, will tend to decrease rather than increase.”
There are more than 30 million apartments and houses in Germany that are heated with gas or oil. A large part of the more than 180,000 municipal buildings (schools, administration buildings, sports halls, etc.) are also heated with gas or oil, explained Landsberg. At the same time, the sanitary trade is signaling that the necessary rapid build-up of specialist staff cannot be achieved in the short or medium term. In addition, in a large number of old buildings, “unfortunately, it is not enough to just replace the heating system, but a total energy renovation is regularly necessary” – this often requires not only new insulation, but also new windows and other things.
Another point of criticism from the municipalities: The planned waiver of conversions if the owners are over 80 years old “should hardly withstand a constitutional review,” said Landsberg. “78- or 79-year-old homeowners could rightly claim objectively unjustified unequal treatment.” Unfortunately, previous plans did not take into account that from the point of view of climate protection, it would make the most sense to first replace the oldest heating systems and thus those that are most harmful to the climate and first to renovate particularly large buildings with particularly high CO2 emissions, complained the DStGB boss. “Since these are often municipal buildings, it would make sense to allow cities and communities to make the investments that are necessary for climate protection.”
The link to the web article: www.noz.de/44471960
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