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Rental apartments in Berlin
Photo: Wolfgang Kumm / DPA
Those who rent can hope to pay only part of the new CO2 tax for heating costs.
As SPIEGEL learned from parliamentary groups, the state secretaries of the responsible ministries want to create a timetable to clear the issue that has been blocked for months, which affects around 23 million households in Germany.
Since the beginning of the year, a tax of 25 euros per tonne of carbon dioxide emitted has been due in the heating sector.
A liter of heating oil rises by around eight cents and a kilowatt hour of natural gas by 0.6 cents.
According to the current legal situation, the CO2 costs are part of the price of heating costs and can be passed on to the end of the tenancy by the landlord without restriction.
The SPD considers this regulation to be unfair, because tenants can regulate their own energy consumption, but they have little influence on whether their apartment is better insulated or equipped with a more modern heating system.
They say that only the landlords could decide that.
If they were to pay part of the CO2 levy, there would also be an increase in the incentive to switch to low-CO2 technology.
Three SPD-led ministries - the Environment, Justice and Finance departments - had already presented a key issues paper in mid-September 2020, according to which tenants and landlords should each bear half of the costs.
Last Friday, the SPD parliamentary group even called for landlords to assume 100 percent of the costs.
The standard of buildings should determine the allocation of costs
In addition to the three SPD ministries, two departments run by the Union are responsible for a corresponding regulation: the Federal Ministry of Economics and the Federal Ministry of the Interior.
For a long time, the negotiations proved difficult.
The CDU houses initially did not react to the SPD colleagues' key issues paper, it is said in negotiating circles.
Later, arbitration rounds were first convened between employees of the ministries and then between department heads - also without result.
Only a round of the five responsible state secretaries on Tuesday brought the breakthrough.
In the round, the ministries discussed a new model according to SPIEGEL information.
According to this, the energetic standard of buildings should determine how the costs are divided.
In the case of poorly renovated buildings, landlords should assume more than 50 percent of the additional costs from CO2 pricing, and less than 50 percent in well-renovated buildings.
The aim is to reward landlords who have already invested money in increasing the energy efficiency of their properties.
"I very much welcome the fact that our parliamentary group decision is apparently having an effect and that the Union is finally ready to talk," says Sören Bartol, the deputy chairman of the SPD parliamentary group in the Bundestag.
"We are now waiting for a constructive proposal from the Union ministries and will then evaluate it together with our ministries involved."
Union has long seen a violation of the polluter pays principle
The Federal Environment Ministry, which is committed to sharing the costs, did not want to comment on the ongoing negotiations.
It only announced that it would continue to comply with the mandate stipulated in the Climate Protection Act to examine the distribution of CO2 costs in the heating sector.
Representatives of the Union had long argued that passing the CO2 costs on to lessors would run counter to the "polluter pays principle".
After all, landlords have no influence on the consumption behavior of tenants.
Accordingly, they shouldn't pay anything for it.
The landlord associations had also spoken out almost word for word beforehand.
Around a third of greenhouse gas emissions in Germany are attributable to the building sector.
By 2030, emissions in this sector will have to fall by around 67 percent compared to 1990 levels to 70 million tonnes in order to comply with the emission levels stipulated in the Climate Protection Act.
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