Asked by ERR why Estonia is adopting European Commission directives, such as pre-cabling of car parks or the LULUCEF sector's greenhouse gas emission reduction requirement, which, on closer inspection, are too much for the country, Michal said that in addition to politicians and officials, businesses should also be monitoring how reasonable different directives are.

"In the case of energy efficiency, there are different agencies in the European Commission that prepare the legislation, then there is the Economic and Social Committee (EESC), with a representative from the Estonian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, who should look at it before it comes here from Europe," said Prime Minister Kristen Michal (Reform).

"Perhaps this was not noticed. But this is a matter for everyone – politicians, businesses and officials. This is not a reproach, but an idea that we need to work together in certain places, because our country is not so big that officials know everything. In the future, the negotiation of all these things will be more thorough, as Minister of Justice Liisa Pakosta (Eesti 200) said last week," Michal added.

"We have already said that we want to postpone ETS 2 and we also want to make the submission of sustainability reports voluntary or periodic," Michal added.

Minister of Energy and the Environment Andres Sutt (Reform) agreed with Michal, adding that many EU agreements, such as ETS 2 or LULUCEF, were concluded at a different time, when the impact of Covid-19, energy crises, or the tariff wars were unknown.

"If something has been agreed in a different context, then it needs to be looked at and reviewed. When I attended the first Environment Council in the European Commission, I also met the commissioner and we agreed that our teams would talk and how this (ETS 2 – ed.) could be resolved. There are other member states for whom this is also an issue," said Sutt.

Sutt also said that every regulation can be implemented to a different degree.

"If we can use more common sense, then we can also make the regulatory landscape more people-friendly," Sutt added.

Minister of Education and Research Kristina Kallas (Eesti 200) said that the volume of documents coming from the European Union exceeds the limits of human capacity to process them.

"Cuts and lay-off requirements will not make things any better, but the likelihood of errors happening will increase. Estonia is a very slim country in terms of the number of civil servants and we have few ministers in our government. Each minister has a bigger portfolio than some of their counterparts in the European Union," Kallas said.

The EU's Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, which was adopted in 2022 and entered into force last year, added the requirement to install ducting and charging infrastructure into buildings in 2018. The directive is part of the FIT55 climate package, which involved 77 stakeholders in the discussions.

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