Social associations, environmental and climate protectors protested on Tuesday in front of the Chancellery against the planned reform of the heating act. “This undertaking has three big losers: tenants, consumers, and climate protection,” said Katja Kipping, managing director of the Paritätischer Gesamtverband. Kipping described the reform as “a clear gift to the gas lobby.”
In front of the Chancellery, among several hundred demonstrators, Fridays for Future spokesperson Carla Reemtsma said, “We are back from our winter sleep and we are taking on the fossil backlash.” The government is pursuing policy “solely for the profits of the gas companies.” Climate protection will be “a longer fight and we will stand on the streets again and again,” Reemtsma said.
Leaders of the governing coalition factions CDU and SPD had on the previous Tuesday presented key points for a revision of the Building Energy Act, which will in the future be called the Building Modernization Act.
Among other things, the rule that, depending on locality size, from summer 2026 or 2027 new heating systems must operate with at least 65 percent renewable energy is to be repealed. Instead, gas and oil heating systems would be able to be installed without restriction, but from 2029 they would have to operate with 10 percent “green gas” or “green oil.”
Kipping: “Freezing is the Only Way to Save”
Because heating gas will become more expensive due to the EU-wide planned rise in the CO2 price, and green biogas or methane are scarce and expensive, Kipping warned of a “cost trap.” Especially tenants whose landlords decide against a heat pump or a district heating connection would suffer. “For them, freezing is the only way to save,” she said.
“We, tenants, will not only be subjected to the extreme fluctuations of gas prices,” said Lisa Kadel of the initiative Soziale Wärmewende, with reference to the gas price shock after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the current price increases as a result of the U.S. strike on Iran. “But we will also be forced to buy scarce and expensive biogas.” Landlords and corporations did not care about tenants, according to Kadel. “They will not participate in the heating transition if they do not receive incentives or are not compelled to.”
Kipping pointed to the vagueness in the government’s outlines, noting that there “is a need for a regulation to protect tenants from inflated ancillary costs caused by the installation of uneconomical heating systems.” If the Union and SPD had not agreed on more concrete tenant protection by this point, “then I fear something bad may come,”
Even if the SPD negotiates the best possible tenant protection into the bill, “the Building Modernization Act would be a catastrophe,” said Kipping. For the Paritätischer Gesamtverband, questions of climate protection are “deeply social questions.” Among the consequences of “extreme temperatures,” particularly vulnerable groups such as the poor, the sick, or people dependent on drugs would “suffer existentially.”
Fridays for Future announce protest wave
Therefore, Kipping urged Federal Environment Minister Carsten Schneider (SPD) to intervene in the cabinet. This is “a matter of honor and your very own personal reputation,” she said to the minister.
Yasin Hinz from Fridays for Future criticized Federal Minister of Economics Katherina Reiche (CDU) for the heating key points: “Reiche has achieved what no minister in this audacity has managed before: she turns our shared future into a weapon for the gas lobby.”
Hinz announced that “our resistance against this backward policy is just beginning.” Fridays for Future had successfully ousted the then-conomy minister Peter Altmaier (CDU) from office in 2021 and had outlasted Reiche’s predecessor Robert Habeck (Greens). “We will show this federal government that it must move forward, not backward.”
