Julia Verlinden

Julia Verlinden (born 18 January 1979 in Bergisch Gladbach) is a German environmental scientist and a politician of Alliance 90/The Greens. She has been a member of the Bundestag since 2013, elected on the state list of Lower Saxony and standing in the constituency of Lüchow-Dannenberg – Lüneburg. The parliament lists her profession as Diplom-Umweltwissenschaftlerin, a graduate in environmental sciences.

On 7 December 2021 the Green parliamentary group elected her one of five deputy chairs, with Agnieszka Brugger, Maria Klein-Schmeink, Lisa Paus and Konstantin von Notz, on the day Katharina Dröge and Britta Haßelmann became the group’s chairs. From 2013 to 2021 she had been the group’s spokesperson on energy policy and a full member of the Committee on Economic Affairs and Energy. In the 21st Bundestag she is a deputy member of that committee, of the Transport Committee, and of the Joint Committee provided for by Article 53a of the Basic Law.

She took the Abitur in 1998 at the Gymnasium Herkenrath in Bergisch Gladbach, finished a Diplom in environmental sciences in 2005, and in 2012 received a doctorate from the University of Lüneburg. The dissertation was titled Energieeffizienzpolitik als Beitrag zum Klimaschutz. Analyse der Umsetzung der EU-Gebäude-Richtlinie in Deutschland (Bereich Wohngebäude). In June 2010 the Heinrich Böll Foundation described the project, then in progress at Leuphana University of Lüneburg, as a qualitative case study of how Germany had implemented Directive 2002/91/EC on the energy performance of buildings in the residential sector. From 2005 to 2006 she was district business manager of the Greens in Lüneburg. From 2006 to 2013 she was a scientific employee of the Federal Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt) in Dessau-Roßlau, and from January to October 2013 she headed its energy-efficiency unit. The agency describes itself as Germany’s main environmental protection authority.

At the federal election of 23 February 2025 the Greens received 25,297 first votes in Lüchow-Dannenberg – Lüneburg, 16.4 percent and 8.7 points below 2021, and 25,647 second votes, 16.6 percent. The SPD led the first vote with 42,910 votes (27.8 percent); turnout was 84.9 percent of 182,679 eligible voters. Parliament records Verlinden as the Green candidate in that constituency and her seat as one awarded from the Lower Saxony list. In a Deutschlandfunk interview on 21 June 2023, after the federal cabinet adopted a reform of the climate-protection law that loosened the previous targets, she blamed that weakening chiefly on the preceding government. The broadcast’s caption recorded her statement that, even without the strict annual sector targets, ministries would remain responsible for meeting their climate goals.

Early life and education

Childhood and schooling

Julia Verlinden was born on 18 January 1979 in Bergisch Gladbach, North Rhine-Westphalia. In a 2022 essay she wrote that the Chernobyl disaster, when she was seven, prompted her parents to change how the family obtained milk and to take the children to an anti-nuclear demonstration in Bonn, and that in the mid-1990s she wrote in the school newspaper on global and intergenerational justice. In 1997, she wrote, she helped organize the bicycle demonstration “gRadwanderung,” with the Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz Deutschland and the Naturschutzjugend, from North Rhine-Westphalia to the planned repository at the Gorleben salt dome. In 1998 she passed the Abitur at the Gymnasium Herkenrath in Bergisch Gladbach.

University studies

After the Abitur she moved to Lüneburg in Lower Saxony. From 1998 to 2005 she studied environmental sciences at the University of Lüneburg and graduated with the Diplom, the qualification later recorded by the Bundestag as Diplom-Umweltwissenschaftlerin. She has connected the move with Lüneburg’s proximity to the Wendland, where Castor transports to Gorleben passed through the city.

Environmental sciences had been added in the 1990s, and in 1997—the year before she enrolled—the university moved from the Rotes Feld to the former Scharnhorst barracks, its later central campus. Her degree was still a Diplom. Only in 2007, after a 2005 merger with the Fachhochschule Nordostniedersachsen and a mandate to become a model institution for the Bologna Process, did the university take the name Leuphana University of Lüneburg and introduce its College, Graduate School and Professional School.

Doctorate

From 2008 to 2012 she wrote her dissertation in cooperation with the Umweltbundesamt (Federal Environment Agency), her employer, whose staff provided specialist information and discussion. In the preface she thanks the Heinrich Böll Foundation for material and non-material support of the doctoral project; her curriculum vitae describes that support as a scholarship from the foundation.

On 7 May 2012 she submitted Energieeffizienzpolitik als Beitrag zum Klimaschutz. Analyse der Umsetzung der EU-Gebäude-Richtlinie in Deutschland (Bereich Wohngebäude) to the Faculty of Cultural Studies at Leuphana for the degree of Doktorin der Philosophie (Dr. phil.), a Doctor of Philosophy. The examiners were Thomas Saretzki (first), Peter Hennicke (second) and Ulrich Smeddinck (third). Hennicke had been president of the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy until 31 January 2008 and remained a senior adviser there. Smeddinck, named in the agency’s foreword as a colleague at the Umweltbundesamt, wrote the third report. The disputation was held on 26 November 2012, and the faculty accepted the dissertation in 2012. A lightly revised version appeared in 2013, with a foreword dated June 2013 by Harry Lehmann of the Umweltbundesamt.

The thesis is a qualitative case study in European Union implementation research and political science policy analysis. It examines Germany’s implementation, from 2003 to 2010, of Directive 2002/91/EC on the energy performance of buildings in the residential sector, using criteria developed for formal transposition and practical application. It concludes that Germany formally implemented most of the directive, but that some requirements—among them energy performance certificates and boiler inspections—were late or weak in practice. Enforcement of the Energieeinsparverordnung lay with the Länder; the study finds controls on existing buildings unsatisfactory and reports very little reliable evidence on whether new or renovated buildings met the rules.

Delays are traced to disagreements between ministries and to a public debate shaped by strong advocates on both sides. Weak enforcement is attributed to a conflict between climate-policy ambition and cutting bureaucracy, in which the Bundesrat rejected random official checks. It argues that the shortcomings came from political contestation rather than from institutional or administrative failure, and it recommends fuller transposition of certificates and heating inspections, sampling controls, support for pro-efficiency coalitions, and subsidies, information and advice alongside regulation, partly to counter the view that the ordinance was voluntary.

Research career at the Federal Environment Agency

Scientific staff, 2006–2012

From 2006 to 2013 Julia Verlinden was a scientific employee (Wissenschaftliche Angestellte) at the Umweltbundesamt, the German Environment Agency, at its seat in Dessau-Roßlau. The Bundestag biography, drawn from members' own disclosures, lists that post as her occupation before she entered parliament.

The agency is a self-standing higher federal authority in the portfolio of the federal environment ministry. The 1974 act that created it charges it with scientific support for the ministry, its own research, environmental information, measurement of large-scale air pollution and public information, and with administrative tasks assigned by other federal laws. The 2012 yearbook recorded a headquarters in Dessau-Roßlau since May 2005, five specialist divisions and just under 1,500 employees on 1,124 posts, almost 800 of them in Dessau-Roßlau.

While on the staff she completed a doctorate (Dr. phil.) at the faculty of cultural studies of Leuphana University of Lüneburg, submitted on 7 May 2012 and defended on 26 November 2012, with Thomas Saretzki, Peter Hennicke and Ulrich Smeddinck of the agency as examiners. The dissertation, Energieeffizienzpolitik als Beitrag zum Klimaschutz. Analyse der Umsetzung der EU-Gebäude-Richtlinie in Deutschland (Bereich Wohngebäude), examined Germany's implementation, from 2003 to 2010, of the European Union Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (2002/91/EC) for residential buildings. She found that most formal requirements had been transposed, but that parts of the rules on energy performance certificates and boiler inspections were late or weak in practice, and that the Länder's checks on minimum standards in the Energieeinsparverordnung for existing buildings were unsatisfactory. She traced those gaps to disagreements between ministries, organised interests on both sides of the debate, and a conflict between climate targets and cutting bureaucracy, rather than to administrative incapacity.

Harry Lehmann, head of Division I, "Umweltplanung und Nachhaltigkeitsstrategien", from 2004 to the end of 2020, wrote a preface dated Dessau, June 2013. He said the dissertation was prepared between 2008 and 2012 in cooperation with the agency, that colleagues had given specialist information, and that Smeddinck had written the third examiner's report. He linked the book to the agency's 2013 focus on building and housing and to its research on renovation techniques, barriers, incentives and legal concepts for a climate-neutral building stock by 2050. In her preface Verlinden thanked the Heinrich Böll Foundation for supporting the project and the agency, her employer, for the conditions in which it was written.

Head of the energy-efficiency unit

From January to October 2013 she headed the unit "Energieeffizienz". In the 2012 yearbook that unit was Fachgebiet I 2.4, listed with the units for energy strategies and scenarios, renewable energy, and energy supply and data as contributors to the chapter on a sustainable energy supply. That chapter treated higher efficiency, a nuclear phase-out within about a decade and faster renewable expansion as the Energiewende the federal government had adopted, and put buildings at about 40 percent of final energy use for heating, hot water, cooling, ventilation and lighting.

In July 2013, while she headed the unit, Fachgebiet I 2.4 edited Strom- und Wärmeversorgung einer Siedlung bei unterschiedlichen Energieeffizienz-Standards (Climate Change 10/2013), a study finished in September 2012. Jens Schuberth and Katja Tschetschorke, named as authors and editors, compared energy use, greenhouse-gas emissions and costs of heat and power systems for a settlement, and asked whether district heating would stay economic once renovations cut heat demand faster than electricity use. Verlinden is not named.

She left in October 2013. In 2017, covering Greens' list nominations in Lower Saxony, the taz noted that until 2013 she had led the energy-efficiency unit and was by then energy-policy spokesperson of the Alliance 90/The Greens parliamentary group.

Party and local politics

Green Youth and the Lower Saxony party

Verlinden joined Alliance 90/The Greens in 1998. The Bundestag biography, which the parliament states is based on the member’s own information, lists her subsequent offices in Lower Saxony: member of the state executive of Grüne Jugend Niedersachsen, the party’s youth organisation, from 1999 to 2001; assessor (Beisitzerin) on the state executive of the Lower Saxony Greens from 2003 to 2005; and member of the state party council (Parteirat) from 2005 to 2007 and again from November 2013 until 2023. A biography archived in December 2015 already recorded those posts and described the second party-council term as running “since November 2013,” the date the later text closes in 2023.

From 2005 to 2006 she was district business manager (Kreisgeschäftsführerin) of the Lüneburg district association (Kreisverband), an organisational role in the local party rather than an elected public mandate. The same biographies place the start of her scientific employment at the Federal Environment Agency in 2006, immediately after that post.

Lüneburg city council and district council

The biography lists her as a city councillor (Ratsfrau) in Lüneburg from 2002 to 2006 and as a member of the district council (Kreistag) of Landkreis Lüneburg from 2006 to 2011. She returned to the city council at the municipal election of 12 September 2021, directly elected in electoral area 1 (Wahlbereich 1) with 1,825 candidate votes. The city’s announcement the next day of the preliminary official result put the Greens first, with 34.85 percent and 15 of 44 seats, ahead of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) on 11 seats (24.88 percent) and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) on eight (19.03 percent). Turnout was 56.21 percent, against 54.4 percent in 2016. The Free Democratic Party (FDP), Die Linke, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), Die PARTEI and dieBasis also won seats. The election-office presentation of the same poll gives the Greens 34.83 percent of combined party and candidate votes and turnout of 56.18 percent.

The historic town hall of Lüneburg, the seat of the city council.

Councillors serve in an honorary capacity. The council, its administrative committee and the specialist committees decide land-use designations, local taxes and the order of investment in schools, roads and social projects. In 2021 the council chose three honorary mayors beside the directly elected mayor: Jule Grunau of the Greens, who was also council chair, Hiltrud Lotze of the SPD and Christel John of the CDU. As of the council page dated 28 September 2026, Verlinden was still listed among the Green members of the 2021–2026 council.

On the evening of 7 May 2025, during that term, the council rejected a Green motion for a municipal tax on single-use packaging, which the group presented as a way to cut waste from takeaway containers. An SPD proposal was adopted instead: the city would first consult other municipalities considering such a tax. NDR’s report did not name an individual sponsor.

She was not re-elected to the city council on 13 September 2026. At the last sitting of the period, outgoing chair Jule Grunau took leave of members who would not return, including Verlinden, whom the city credited with nine years on the council; the city reported the sitting in a press release of 2 October 2026. The election committee confirmed the result on 17 September. Nine parties shared 42 seats, down from 44 because of new census figures. The Greens remained largest, with 12 seats and 29.33 percent, followed by the SPD with nine (21.16 percent) and the CDU with seven (16.83 percent). Turnout was 67.42 percent. The new council was to meet for its constitutive sitting on 12 November 2026.

The same election returned her to the district council. The Landkreis Lüneburg election presentation records a direct mandate in electoral area 2, Hansestadt Lüneburg Süd, with 1,435 votes. In that count the Greens received 12 of 58 seats and 20.19 percent of combined party and candidate votes, the CDU 13 seats (23.01 percent) and the SPD 13 (22.65 percent), with district turnout at 70.1 percent. The presentation describes the figures as the complete set of polling-station quick reports.

Membership of the Bundestag

Entry, list mandate and committees

Julia Verlinden entered the Bundestag when the 18th electoral term was constituted on 22 October 2013. The stenographic report lists her among the members named in the roll call at that sitting. She has held a seat through the 19th, 20th and 21st terms. For the 18th term (2013–2017), the 19th and the 20th (2021–2025), and in the current biography, the seat is recorded as a mandate from the state list of Alliance 90/The Greens in Lower Saxony, with a candidacy in constituency 37, Lüchow-Dannenberg – Lüneburg. For the Bundestag elected on 23 February 2025, the federal returning officer lists her as returned on place 3 of the Green list in Lower Saxony and as a candidate in constituency 037.

Committee assignments changed with the term and, from 2021, with her place on the group executive. In the 18th term she was a full member of the Committee on Economic Affairs and Energy and a deputy member of the Committee on the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety. In the 19th term she was again a full member of the economic-affairs and energy committee and a deputy member of the Committee on the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety. From 2014 to 2016 she was also a deputy member of the Commission on the Storage of High-Level Radioactive Waste under section 3 of the Site Selection Act. In the 20th term the archived biography lists her as a deputy, not a full, member of the Committee on Climate Action and Energy and of the Committee on the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection.

In the 21st term she is a deputy member of the Committee on Economic Affairs and Energy, of the Transport Committee, and of the Joint Committee under Article 53a of the Basic Law. The Joint Committee's rules give it 32 Bundestag members and 16 Bundesrat members, plus an equal number of substitutes, with the Bundestag places filled at the start of each term in proportion to group strength.

Energy-policy spokesperson, 2013–2021

On 20 December 2013 the Green parliamentary group elected Verlinden its spokesperson for energy policy. A Lüneburg news site reported the election that day and said she would sit on the Committee on Economic Affairs and Energy and as a substitute on the environment committee. The Bundestag biography, whose narrative rests on members' own statements, records the spokespersonship and full membership of that committee as lasting from 2013 to 2021, across the 18th and 19th terms, and lists her for the same years as a board member of the cross-party Parliamentary Circle on Energy Efficiency. Both offices are dated as ending in 2021, when she joined the group executive. From the 20th term her committee places were deputy memberships rather than the full economics-committee seat tied to the spokesperson's role.

Deputy chair of the Green parliamentary group

On 7 December 2021 the Green group elected Katharina Dröge and Britta Haßelmann as chairs, in place of Anton Hofreiter and Katrin Göring-Eckardt, who had led it for eight years. The same meeting elected five deputy chairs: Agnieszka Brugger, Maria Klein-Schmeink, Lisa Paus, Verlinden, identified with the Lüchow-Dannenberg – Lüneburg constituency, and Konstantin von Notz.

Julia Verlinden speaking at the lectern in the Bundestag plenary chamber.

The Bundestag data handbook lists Verlinden as a deputy chair for the whole of the 20th term, with no mid-term start or end date beside her name. It does record a change among the other deputies: Paus until April 2022, and Andreas Audretsch from 10 May 2022, while Dröge and Haßelmann remained the chairs. In the group's published allocation of work she is, as deputy chair, political coordinator of its second policy department. That department covers environment, nature and climate protection; food, agriculture and animal welfare; energy; mobility; building, housing and municipalities; and tourism. The working groups assigned to it correspond to the related Bundestag committees.

After the election of 23 February 2025 the group, then of 85 members, decided on 26 February to keep the existing executive in office on an acting basis, Verlinden among the acting deputy chairs with Audretsch, Brugger and von Notz. On 24 March it confirmed Dröge and Haßelmann as chairs, each with 90.4 per cent, and Irene Mihalic as first parliamentary managing director with 93.9 per cent. The 21st Bundestag was constituted on 25 March. On 29 April the group completed the board. Der Spiegel reported the election of Audretsch, Verlinden, von Notz, Brugger and Misbah Khan as deputy chairs. The Bundestag archive states that the four acting deputies remained after that vote and that Khan was added. The data handbook's table for the 21st term, dated 25 September 2026, lists the same five deputy chairs under Dröge and Haßelmann.

Energy and climate policy

Renewable electricity and the coal phase-out

From 2013 to 2021 Verlinden was energy-policy spokesperson for Alliance 90/The Greens in the Bundestag and sat on the committee for economic affairs and energy; since 2021 she has been a deputy chair of the parliamentary group. In January 2019 the coal commission agreed on an exit by 2038 at the latest, with a 2032 check on whether 2035 was possible. On 3 July 2020 the CDU/CSU and SPD passed the coal phase-out law against the other groups; a division confirmed it, 314 to 237, with three abstentions. The Greens backed regional structural aid and voted against the phase-out statute.

Verlinden co-authored a rejected Green amendment—120 votes to 539—that would have barred new coal plants whose permits were missing or still contested on 29 January 2020. Annalena Baerbock said the bill let Datteln 4 come online, fixed the Garzweiler mine in law, and paid the operators about 4.3 billion euros, contrary to the commission.

In the 20th Bundestag the Greens governed with the SPD and the FDP. On 7 July 2022, at the final reading of the “Easter package” amending the Renewable Energy Sources Act, Verlinden said wind and solar would expand “in steps never seen before”: 2 percent of the land, with a duty on every state, for turbines, and more photovoltaics on roofs, car parks and farmland. She called renewables “Freiheitsenergien” the Union had capped, recalled citizen investment at the start of the energy transition, and said lower consumption would bring a full renewable supply sooner. The partners, she added, had each made concessions, and efficiency policy was still outstanding. Katrin Uhlig stated the 80 percent renewable-electricity target for 2030. CDU/CSU speaker Mark Helfrich called much of the package “rotten eggs.” Association and opposition criticism, he said, had forced the coalition to drop a legally fixed climate-neutral power system by 2035 on security-of-supply grounds, and grids below 110 kilovolts remained outside the “overriding public interest” attached to renewables, so distribution would lag generation.

On 4 October 2022 RWE agreed to end lignite generation in 2030, eight years early, leaving about 280 million tonnes of coal, and about as much CO₂, unreleased, without extra compensation; Neurath D and E would run temporarily so that gas plants could be used less. In March 2023 the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported a Green group draft seeking 2030 nationwide, including eastern districts then scheduled eight years later. The Federal Network Agency put renewables at 59.0 percent of generation in 2024, against 56.0 percent in 2023; hard coal fell 31.2 percent and lignite 8.8 percent, while gas rose 8.6 percent.

Gas, the 2022 energy crisis and climate legislation

In the July 2022 debate Verlinden said Russia’s war against Ukraine had thrown energy markets out of joint, that fossil prices were “running wild,” and that saving gas was the first priority alongside more renewables. The coalition also rushed liquefied natural gas terminals to replace Russian pipeline gas. A New Climate Institute analysis reported by Der Spiegel in December 2022 said full use of the planned terminals would break the climate statute and the Paris Agreement, even allowing for a later switch to hydrogen, and would divert effort from efficiency and renewables. Burning that gas alone, it said, could in 2030 equal a third of the emissions still allowed in the energy sector.

The climate law was rewritten during her time as deputy chair. On 21 June 2023, after the cabinet agreed to drop strict annual sector caps, she told Deutschlandfunk that the result was a compromise caused above all by the previous government, and that ministries would remain responsible for their climate goals. When FDP transport minister Volker Wissing warned in April 2024 of weekend driving bans if the reform stalled, she called the claim false and said a minister should not raise fears without cause. Existing law, she said, required only a climate programme with sensible measures—she named a speed limit—after transport had repeatedly missed its CO₂ limits.

On 15 April 2024 Spiegel reported agreement among the three groups to abolish those annual caps and to ease rules for balcony solar, shared rooftop photovoltaics and solar on farmland. Verlinden called the reform “a strong update” that would make climate policy “fit for the next 20 years on Germany’s path to climate neutrality,” with the government bound to set measures for 2030 to 2040. FDP deputy leader Lukas Köhler said the change ruled out driving bans. Environmental groups called it a softening; Greens and Social Democrats had feared weaker obligations, especially in transport. When the amendment took effect in July 2024, Deutsche Umwelthilfe went to the Federal Constitutional Court. Director Jürgen Resch called it a “verfassungswidrige Entkernung”—an unconstitutional hollowing-out—and said the group would not accept the breach it alleged: the reduction path was gone, only the cabinet as a whole was accountable, and sectors could offset one another, contrary to the court’s 2021 climate judgment.

The election of 23 February 2025 ended that majority. The Greens won 11.6 percent and 85 seats, the CDU/CSU 28.5 percent and 208, and the SPD 16.4 percent and 120; the FDP, on 4.3 percent, left the Bundestag. CDU leader Friedrich Merz said he would seek a coalition with the SPD. Verlinden remained a deputy chair of the Green group.

Buildings and heating policy

From the EU buildings directive to German law

Verlinden’s 2012 doctorate at Leuphana University of Lüneburg, published in 2013 with Thomas Saretzki as supervisor, analysed how Germany had applied the EU buildings directive—Directive 2002/91/EC—to housing: *Energieeffizienzpolitik als Beitrag zum Klimaschutz. That question later shaped her defence of heating legislation as deputy chair of the Alliance 90/The Greens group in the Bundestag.

On 8 September 2023 the Bundestag passed the amended Buildings Energy Act (Gebäudeenergiegesetz), widely called the heating law, by 399 votes to 275, with five abstentions. New heating systems had to draw at least 65 percent of the heat they supplied from renewable energy. From 1 January 2024 it applied to new buildings in new development areas; elsewhere it followed municipal heat plans, due by mid-2026 in large cities and mid-2028 elsewhere, and was to cover every new installation by mid-2028. Existing boilers could keep running and be repaired. With about three quarters of heating still on fossil gas or oil, the government tied the act to climate neutrality by 2045 and offered grants of up to 70 percent of eligible replacement costs. Economics minister Robert Habeck called it a good law that created legal certainty, balanced social effects and shielded consumers from high energy prices.

After the coalition of the Social Democratic Party, the Greens and the Free Democratic Party collapsed, housing minister Klara Geywitz told a Berlin housing-industry conference that the act should be fundamentally simplified. Spiegel reported on 20 November 2024 that she found it too detailed, and preferred carbon budgets for construction and operation over technical prescriptions. Verlinden called that a transparent diversion from what she described as three years in which the SPD had barely protected tenants, including the lack of a rent brake worthy of the name. She said many exceptions, among them hydrogen heating that would hardly become reality, were SPD and FDP special requests, and that renewable-heat and efficiency rules could be stated more clearly. Fossil heating, she added, would grow dearer, while a climate-neutral system would pay for itself. FDP floor leader Christian Dürr said his party wanted longer deadlines and a later rise in the renewable share.

The Buildings Energy Act and later reforms

The CDU/CSU–SPD government treated repeal of the 65 percent rule as a coalition promise. Economics minister Katherina Reiche introduced the Building Modernisation Act (Gebäudemodernisierungsgesetz) as an end to a “politics of mistrust,” arguing that technology openness did not contradict cutting carbon dioxide, and describing the old rules as a compulsion to install a heat pump. New oil and gas boilers are again allowed. Under section 43, a gas, oil or liquefied-gas system installed after 29 July 2026 must cover a rising share of heat with biomethane, bio-oil, biogenic liquefied gas or specified hydrogen—the Biotreppe: at least 10 percent from 1 January 2029, 15 percent from 2030, 30 percent from 2035 and 60 percent from 2040, with solar thermal, heat-recovery ventilation and some heat-pump hybrids allowed as alternatives. A green-gas quota for existing systems was to start in 2028, and the ban on fossil boiler operation from 2045 was replaced by a further law due by early December 2026.

On 10 July 2026 the Bundestag adopted the bill in a recorded final vote, 323 to 271 of 594 votes cast, with no abstentions. The CDU/CSU and SPD voted yes; the Greens, the Left and the AfD voted no, and the Bundesrat cleared the text the same day. Union deputy leader Sepp Müller said the coalition was replacing tutelage with freedom of choice.

In that debate Verlinden cited the Iran war and the risk of scarce, expensive fossil fuels, and said new oil and gas heating would make heat costlier for households and businesses and leave Germany exposed to imports: “Dieses Teuer-Heizen-Gesetz ist die schlechteste Wirtschaftspolitik aller Zeiten.” Commercial tenants, she argued, would fall into a heating-cost trap, unable to choose the system yet charged the full bill, while the government assumed green-gas volumes that did not exist. In April, when the coalition agreed that landlords installing new oil or gas systems would split the carbon price and gas-network charges with tenants from 2028, and the biofuel surcharge from 2029, she said there was still no protection against market prices. A hardship clause for unmodernised, locally cheap buildings was “downright cynical,” she said, because people with little money often lived in them. In May she told taz that post-crisis gas prices were “a ticking time bomb” and that loosening the Buildings Energy Act would drive gas use higher. Days before the vote she said promising a later law to restore climate protection created planning and legal uncertainty for firms, tenants and landlords.

BUND’s Irmela Benz Colaço called biofuels a “sham package,” neither climate-neutral nor available in the volumes required; after the vote, Tina Löffelsend of BUND said new oil and gas heating would prolong import dependence and raise costs. Deutsche Umwelthilfe announced a constitutional complaint, arguing that costly so-called green gases would lock in fossil infrastructure against statutory climate targets, and Green co-chair Katharina Dröge called the reform an accelerant of the climate crisis.

Nuclear power and radioactive waste

Gorleben and the Wendland constituency

Verlinden's Bundestag constituency, Lüchow-Dannenberg – Lüneburg, comprises the districts of Lüchow-Dannenberg and Lüneburg in Lower Saxony, including the Wendland. In Lüchow-Dannenberg lies the Gorleben salt dome, where an exploratory mine was sunk and a surface hall still stores high-level radioactive waste.

On 22 February 1977 Lower Saxony's minister-president Ernst Albrecht (CDU) named Gorleben the provisional site of a nuclear disposal centre for reprocessing and a repository. A March 1979 tractor trek from the Wendland ended in Hanover before nearly 100,000 people, after which the state dropped reprocessing. On 3 May 1980 opponents occupied drilling site 1004 as the hut settlement "Republik Freies Wendland", which several thousand police cleared on 4 June. The storage hall, built in 1982–83, has been licensed since 2 June 1995 under section 6 of the Atomic Energy Act until 31 December 2034. Of 420 spaces, 113 are occupied; the operator is the federally owned BGZ. Castor shipments began on 25 April 1995. The thirteenth and last, from reprocessing at La Hague, arrived on 28 November 2011 with more than 20,000 police.

The repository commission and site selection

From 2014 to 2016 Verlinden was the substitute Bundestag member of the Commission on the Storage of High-Level Radioactive Waste under section 3 of the Site Selection Act. The full member for Alliance 90/The Greens was Sylvia Kotting-Uhl; the nomination is printed paper 18/1071 of 9 April 2014. The commission did not choose a site. Its report of 19 July 2016, Verantwortung für die Zukunft (printed paper 18/9100), recommended a comparative, participatory search and proposed that Gorleben be judged by the same criteria as every other candidate. A revised Site Selection Act, largely in force from 16 May 2017, restarted the search on a "white map" under the Bundesgesellschaft für Endlagerung (BGE), and section 36 required Gorleben to be assessed like any other area.

On 28 September 2020 the BGE's sub-area report did not designate Gorleben-Rambow. It met the exclusion criteria and minimum requirements, but the geoscientific weighing criteria in section 24—especially protection of the containment-providing rock zone by the overburden—were rated "not favourable", so section 36 removed it from later siting proposals. Verlinden said this showed that the 1970s choice had been political rather than scientific and made the new procedure more credible, while calling for open geological data and participation in regions still under review, including north-eastern Lower Saxony. On 17 September 2021 the environment ministry ordered the mine closed: of 139 salt domes that had passed the earlier filters, Gorleben and 78 others failed the weighing step, leaving 90 sub-areas.

The nuclear phase-out

After the accident at Fukushima Daiichi, the Bundestag on 30 June 2011, with the votes of the CDU/CSU, FDP, SPD and Greens, set the end of 2022 for the remaining power reactors. The vote reversed lifetime extensions that a CDU/CSU–FDP government had added after an earlier red-green decision to leave nuclear power. In the 2022 energy crisis following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Chancellor Olaf Scholz ended a coalition dispute by using his authority to set policy guidelines. The nineteenth amendment to the Atomic Energy Act kept Isar 2, Neckarwestheim 2 and Emsland in stretch-out operation until 15 April 2023 on fuel already in the reactors.

On 11 November 2022 the Bundestag passed the amendment by 375 votes to 216, with 70 abstentions. Votes cast were 189–0 for the SPD and 85–0 for the FDP in favour, and 175–0 against from the CDU/CSU. The Greens split 101–9, with one abstention; Verlinden was among the nine. She wrote that stress tests gave the southern plants little or no role, that Emsland would add little power because nearby wind was already curtailed, and that further weeks without a current periodic safety review extended an uncontrollable accident risk. Harald Ebner said the Green majority could accept the compromise because the phase-out remained and no new fuel would be bought. Steffen Bilger (CDU/CSU) said operation only until mid-April did too little for the following winter. A separate CDU/CSU bill was rejected the same day by 413 votes to 242.

The three reactors disconnected on 15 April 2023: Emsland at 22:37, Isar 2 at 23:52 and Neckarwestheim 2 at 23:59. Federal supervisor Gerrit Niehaus said power operation from 16 April would have been a criminal offence. Environment minister Steffi Lemke said the shutdown made Germany safer because accident consequences were ultimately unmanageable, while SPD chair Saskia Esken welcomed the exit from what she called highly dangerous nuclear power and rejected FDP calls to pursue fusion for electricity.

Electoral record

The constituency

Verlinden’s Bundestag constituency is number 37, Lüchow-Dannenberg – Lüneburg, in Lower Saxony. For 2013, 2017, 2021 and 2025 the Federal Returning Officer defines it as the districts of Lüchow-Dannenberg and Lüneburg in full and keeps the number 37; those delimitation pages do not record a renumbering or a change to that two-district area. The district of Lüneburg includes the city of Lüneburg.

At the end of 2023 the constituency had 70 municipalities, 2,555.2 square kilometres and 226,200 inhabitants. She has stood there as the direct candidate of Alliance 90/The Greens and holds her seat from the Lower Saxony state list, not as the constituency winner.

Results, 2013–2025

Voters cast a first vote for a constituency candidate and a second vote for a party’s state list; second votes determine how many seats the party receives. From the 2025 election a party candidate wins the constituency seat only with a plurality of first votes and coverage by the party’s second votes in the Land; remaining seats go down the state list, skipping anyone already elected in a constituency. A lost direct candidacy can therefore still yield a Bundestag seat. In 2017 and 2021 the returning officer recorded the party with the most first votes as elected in the constituency; in 2013 the same plurality, and Eckhard Pols’s biography, identify a direct mandate for the Christian Democratic Union. Verlinden was not the constituency winner at any of her four elections and was seated from the Lower Saxony Green list.

On 22 September 2013, with 179,069 people eligible and turnout at 74.6 percent, the candidate list names Julia Verlinden for the Greens, also on list place 3, Eckhard Pols for the CDU and Hiltrud Lotze for the Social Democratic Party. Verlinden received 15,918 first votes (12.0 percent) and the Greens 18,892 second votes (14.3 percent). Pols won with 52,644 first votes (39.8 percent); Lotze’s SPD total was 44,491 (33.7 percent). On 8 March 2013 a Green delegate conference had ranked Katja Keul and Jürgen Trittin ahead of her, and her archived biography records a list mandate tied to constituency 37.

On 24 September 2017 turnout was 78.0 percent of 180,865 eligible voters. Verlinden, list place 1, took 20,604 first votes (14.8 percent); Green second votes were 18,906 (13.5 percent). Pols held the seat with 46,740 first votes (33.5 percent), ahead of Lotze for the SPD on 39,169 (28.1 percent). The elected-member register lists Verlinden under Lower Saxony, place 1, with a candidacy in constituency 37. Delegates on 19 February 2017 had put her first on the list, ahead of Trittin.

On 26 September 2021 turnout was 76.2 percent of 182,673 eligible voters. Jakob Blankenburg stood for the SPD, Pols again for the CDU, and Verlinden for the Greens on list place 5. Blankenburg won with 38,784 first votes (28.2 percent). Verlinden was second on 34,606 (25.1 percent), ahead of Pols on 34,287 (24.9 percent); Green second votes were 30,585 (22.1 percent). She was recorded as elected from list place 5 while a candidate in constituency 37. The party’s 2021 list placed Filiz Polat, Sven-Christian Kindler, Christina-Johanne Schröder and Trittin above her.

On 23 February 2025, 155,019 of 182,679 eligible voters participated (84.9 percent). The results page names Blankenburg as elected with 42,910 first votes (27.8 percent) and Marco Schulze of the CDU as runner-up with 40,563 (26.3 percent). Verlinden, again the constituency candidate, received 25,297 first votes (16.4 percent, down 8.7 points) and the Greens 25,647 second votes (16.6 percent, down 5.5). The elected register gives her list place 3. A delegate conference in Hanover on 14 December 2024 had ordered the list Filiz Polat, Helge Limburg, then Verlinden.

Other roles, memberships and personal life

Portfolios beyond energy

Since 2021 Verlinden has been a deputy chair of the parliamentary group of Alliance 90/The Greens in the Bundestag. The group names her political coordinator of its second department, covering the environment, nature and climate protection, food, agriculture and animal welfare, energy, mobility, building, housing and local government, and tourism. The working groups placed there are agriculture, food and Heimat; tourism; the environment, climate, nature conservation and nuclear safety; mobility and transport; and housing, urban development, building and municipalities. In the 21st Bundestag she is not a full member of a standing committee. She is a deputy member of the Committee on Transport and of the Committee on Economic Affairs and Energy, and a deputy member of the Joint Committee under Article 53a of the Basic Law.

On 20 October 2023, in the second and third reading of the Third Act amending toll law (printed papers 20/8092 and 20/8894), she said that using truck-toll revenue only for roads, a rule she traced to 2011 and to the Christian Social Union, had left the rail network in poor condition. She argued the bill would shift much of that money to rail repair and that federal spending on rail would then exceed road-building by 42 percent. CDU/CSU and AfD speakers called the increase a heavy extra cost for hauliers and households. On 5 July 2024, in a current-affairs hour called by Die Linke, she described chronic rail delays, including during the European football championship, blamed earlier CSU transport ministers Peter Ramsauer, Alexander Dobrindt and Andreas Scheuer, and said the coalition had begun repairs.

On 20 January 2024 she and Renate Künast issued the group paper “7-Punkte Plan: Perspektiven für unsere Landwirtschaft.” It argued for farms that could support their workers and meet climate, nature and animal-welfare standards. The points included fairer prices, a further step in statutory husbandry labelling, an “animal-welfare cent” to pay for barn conversion, organic farming, keeping farmland in production, less bureaucracy and alternative farm drives. In the 1 February 2024 budget debate on the agriculture ministry she said floods and drought were hitting harvests, raising the cost of keeping animals and pushing up food prices, and she cited a citizens’ assembly proposal for free meals in daycare and school.

Disclosures, memberships and private life

The Bundestag publishes posts and payments required under the members’ code of conduct. Verlinden is listed as a supervisory-board member of Lüneburger Wohnungsbau GmbH (LüWoBau) in Lüneburg, with no separate fee on that page, and as a Lüneburg city councillor at €220 gross a month, plus irregular payments of €560 gross in 2025. She is an honorary advisory-board member of Deutsche Unternehmensinitiative Energieeffizienz (DENEFF), with no payment recorded. The biography, which the parliament says rests on her own statements, lists Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz Deutschland (BUND), The Compensators, the services union ver.di, Verein zur Förderung politischen Handelns (v.f.h.) and Verkehrsclub Deutschland (VCD).

A 2020 Bundestag account of “Parlamentarier schützen Parlamentarier” said she sponsored activists in Chile, Sri Lanka and Iran, including, from March 2019, the Tehran writer Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee, whose charges she called absurd. It did not name the people in Chile and Sri Lanka. A biography from the 18th electoral term, archived in September 2016, described her as married. The current page names neither a spouse nor children. Her constituency office is at Auf dem Wüstenort 4–5 in Lüneburg, where she also sits on the city council; no private address is published.