Blue-black savings plans “bad news” for the climate and the population

For Vienna’s climate councilor Jürgen Czernohorszky, the savings plans presented today by the blue-black government negotiators are “bad news” with potentially massively negative effects on domestic climate protection and thus on the population. “Climate protection is human protection,” emphasizes Czernohorszky and therefore “indispensable and non-negotiable in order to maintain a high quality of life.”

Czernohorszky fears that the cancellation of tax advantages for electric vehicles, the sales tax exemption for solar power modules and the announced “smoothing” of environmental funding are all measures that “will set us far back in the fight against the effects of the climate crisis.”

Achieving climate neutrality by 2040 is an “absolutely non-negotiable necessity” given the increasingly extreme effects of the climate crisis that are being felt worldwide. The blue-black savings plans meant 500 million euros less per year for environmental funding alone. According to Czernohorszky, this has a major impact on the necessary expansion of climate-neutral energy such as district heating and the construction of large heat pumps.

Renewable energies such as solar power are important factors in achieving climate neutrality by 2040; Czernohorszky believes that abolishing the sales tax exemption for PV modules could severely slow down the boom: “In recent years, we have been able to make great progress in the expansion of solar power, also thanks to targeted city subsidies for private individuals and companies,” says Czernohorszky. This progress is now in danger of stalling because of the announced cuts, also because these could affect the entire industry. Vienna is now the only federal state that is promoting the expansion of photovoltaics with its own funding program. The fact that the city’s measures are bearing fruit can also be seen from the 12 percent reduction in greenhouse gases in 2023. That is almost twice as high as the Austrian average, recalled Czernohorszky.

The outgoing black-green federal government has set itself the goal of making Austria climate-neutral by 2040: “In recent years, however, it has already been clear that the ÖVP does not take climate protection that seriously. Now, after just a few days of blue-black negotiations, this assessment has been consolidated once again,” criticizes Czernohorszky.

What is also bitter is the cancellation of the climate bonus without replacement, which, according to Czernohorszky, would de facto amount to a “mass tax” due to the lack of redistribution of the CO2 tax. Although the climate bonus would have required reform due to its unfair distribution, it was still an important social measure. The abolition of the climate bonus is “the absolute opposite of social,” concluded Czernohorszky.