Driven by its obsession to make Germany “climate neutral” by 2045, the German government has tried to rush through special legislation, a Building Energy Act (GEG), to make drastic reduction of CO2 emissions mandatory for heating systems. This would imply a replacement of millions of heating systems, more than half of which, in households, are based on natural gas, and would require 600 billion euros or more of investments.
That has been stopped by an injunction of the Constitutional Court, the final ruling of which is still pending. If that ruling doesn’t come in the next days, the parliament will not be able to debate the legislation before the end of the recess in September, and upcoming elections for new parliament in the states of Bavaria and Hesse mid-October may delay the project for even longer.
Thomas Heilmann, a CDU member of the Bundestag, had applied for an interim injunction to prohibit the Bundestag from holding final deliberations and voting on the bill unless the bill were submitted to the members of parliament in writing at least 14 days in advance — which was not the case, because the government supplied the parliament with the 100-page text of the planned legislation only a few days ago.
