In Bavaria, greenhouse gas emissions fell by 18 percent from 1990 to 2021. This emerges from a response from the Environment Ministry to a request from the Greens in the state parliament, which is available to the German Press Agency. “That’s not even half of what the federal government achieved at 40 percent in the same period. And in the last ten years, almost nothing has happened in Bavaria in terms of climate protection,” said the state parliamentary group’s energy policy spokesman, Martin Stümpfig. According to the state government’s plan, Bavaria should be climate neutral by 2040.
Stumpfig accuses the state government of intentionally withholding emissions figures from the public: “Neither the current climate report nor the websites of the responsible ministries contain any meaningful data.” The Ministry of the Environment only made this available to him following his written request. “Bavaria is only ahead when it comes to tricks and concealing climate data. The climate balance is devastating and the state government bears a great deal of responsibility for the increasing damage caused by storms, droughts and the great stress on people caused by heat.”
Accordingly, emissions in the transport sector in Bavaria have increased by more than five percent over the past 30 years (up to 2019). An absurdity, as Stümpfig thinks: “There must finally be an end to further road construction orgies. Strengthening buses, trains and expanding cycle paths are urgently needed.” In addition to the transport sector, the “climate problem child” is the heating sector. Bavaria has only achieved a fifth of the federal government’s reduction, said Stümpfig.
“Despite the miserable balance sheet, the state government continues to refuse a heat law, the expansion of geothermal energy and a good funding program for energy renovation and heating networks. So the Bavarian heat transition will never happen.”
The large discrepancy between Germany and Bavaria cannot be explained by a particularly strong increase in the population in Bavaria, as the state government likes to and often tries to do, emphasized Stümpfig. “In terms of per capita emissions, a reduction of six tons was achieved in the federal government. In Bavaria, however, only 2.5 tons per capita.”
Only the fact that no coal is mined in Bavaria and is burned on a larger scale in coal-fired power plants improves Bavaria’s balance sheet. In addition, the increasing electricity imports, which also contained a share of coal, would be embezzled in the Free State. “But these would worsen the balance per capita by almost half a ton of CO₂.”