On COM(2026) 616, new Art. 9c: carbon-removal liabilities are assigned to no one - and why the revision must assign them to emitters

Submitted by Jan Kechel, citizen (Germany), who maintains the public register co2-entnahme.info/register: the removal costs of all 26 gas-fired power plants planned, permitted or under construction in Germany - per installation, with sources and the authorities' answers.

1. The problem, in brief. The 1.5 C threshold is already exceeded (2024 the first calendar year above it; Copernicus/WMO). Returning below it - as fast as possible, before further tipping points are crossed - is a legal duty, not a policy preference (German Constitutional Court 1 BvR 2656/18; ECtHR KlimaSeniorinnen 2024), and it is achievable only by actively removing CO2 already emitted; net-zero merely stops the increase. Every emitted tonne is thus a future removal cost (EUR 388-500/t, Potsdam Institute figures before the German Constitutional Court), measurable per installation under ETS monitoring. Yet this cost is recorded nowhere: twelve written statements from German authorities in six Laender and at federal level (June-July 2026, each with a file number) confirm that removal costs are examined in no permitting procedure, no EIA, no budget and no balance sheet - while every authority points to the ETS as the exhaustive instrument (Sec. 5(2) BImSchG even bars going beyond it). The financial supervisor (BaFin) completed the chain on 3 August 2026: never examined in enforcement, no supervisory position, no known case of such a provision. The instrument cited as exhaustive omits the largest cost. (Full record and originals: attached dossier.)

2. The model chosen leaves that debt untouched - and shifts its cost to the public. COM(2026) 616 integrates removals by raising the cap: 250 million newly created allowances, auctioned 2031-2040, fund the Commission's central purchase of an equivalent amount of CRCF-certified units (new Art. 9c) - "guaranteed additional emission space". Each purchased unit is cancelled to cover a new emission: "the cancellation of a removal unit replaces the surrendering of an emission allowance" (recital 32). Consequences: (a) removals offset future flows only - not one tonne of the already-emitted stock is drawn down, while gross emission space grows by the same amount; (b) the polluter does not pay - the purchase is financed through the market and thus socialised, and direct operator integration is deferred to a 2034 report (Art. 9c(8)); (c) the scale concedes the gap - 250 Mt for the whole EU over a decade is less than the 30.6 Mt per year of Germany's 26 planned gas plants alone, and the budget holds only if removal prices fall to near allowance prices (against EUR 388-500/t; recital 33).

3. Our request. Neither surrendering allowances nor the central purchase of removals removes the tonnes an installation has already emitted - and neither discharges the emitter's obligation to recognise and provision that removal cost (IAS 37; Sec. 249 HGB), which falls due in addition, not instead. The legislator cannot decide whether these costs exist; physics and accounting law settle that. It decides only who bears them. We therefore ask the co-legislators to add: (a) an obligation on Member States, in addition to and separately from ETS revenue, to calculate and disclose in their public budgets the full removal cost attributable to the installations they permit (for Germany: 26 new gas plants ~ 30.6 Mt CO2/yr ~ EUR 305 bn over 20 years at EUR 500/t, a conservative floor) and to demonstrably spend ring-fenced funds on permanent removal in proportion to that debt; and (b) one clarifying sentence in the Directive: compliance with the EU ETS does not relieve emitters of their responsibility for, and provisioning of, the full removal cost of their emissions (Art. 191(2) TFEU). Either way, the EUR 305 bn must appear somewhere - not, as today, nowhere. A dossier with file numbers and sources is attached.