IAccording to Federal Transport Minister Volker Wissing (FDP), there are still unanswered questions in the dispute over the future of new vehicles with combustion engines in the EU. “Now the last legal questions have to be clarified with regard to the technical implementation of this proposal,” he said on Friday in Mainz
The Ministry of Transport and the EU Commission are currently sending each other regular letters with proposals and trying to find a solution to the current blockade. Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) expects an agreement to be reached quickly. “I know that journalism is also an entertainment business and that of course you think it’s really stupid that we just come to an agreement. But that will happen, and quite quickly,” said the SPD politician at a press conference in Brussels on Friday.
Wissing had emailed a statement to the European Commission late Thursday evening. In it he demands that Climate Protection Commissioner Frans Timmermans or the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen explain in detail in a letter they will sign how they will implement this declaration.
The FAZ has received the email sent by State Secretary Hartmut Höppner to the Timmermans office manager. The declaration provides for a multi-stage procedure with which Wissing wants to ensure that new cars with combustion engines that are actually powered by e-fuels can still be registered after 2035.
Procedure in several steps
As a first step, the Commission should propose a legal act that would create a new type of vehicle that runs exclusively on climate-neutral synthetic fuels and can still be registered after 2035. This would build on the existing EU type approval rules. The Commission could adopt that quickly. She submitted a draft for this to Wissing last Sunday. EU states and the European Parliament could probably slow that down at best.
However, this would not solve the problem that the new rules for CO2 emissions from cars, which Wissing has blocked so far, stipulate that new cars may no longer emit CO2 from 2035 onwards. Combustion engines powered by synthetic fuels are climate-neutral because the CO2 emitted is extracted from the air beforehand during the production of the fuel. But CO2 comes out of the exhaust.
As a second step, after the final adoption of the CO2 limit values for cars, the EU Commission should therefore present a so-called delegated legal act in a timely manner, before autumn 2023, which will allow these vehicles to be credited without quantitative restrictions.
Unlike the legal act on type approval, however, this legal act could be overturned by the EU member states and the European Parliament. However, the threshold for this is higher than in a normal legislative procedure. Nevertheless, Wissing is preparing for this case as well.
As a third step, the Commission should therefore propose a revision of the CO2 limit values for cars if the delegated legal act is blocked by the other EU states or the EU Parliament. However, that would then be a normal EU law that would have to be adopted by the member states with a qualified majority and the European Parliament with a simple majority. The Commission responded to this letter on Friday morning and sent its reply to the Federal Ministry of Transport.