The European Investment Bank (the EIB), the EU's bank, is the world's largest clean energy lender. True! Yet their lending is not (yet) enough to achieve the transition to a low-carbon economy the EU needs and has mandated by 2050.
I'm sitting in a meeting in Luxembourg with their management team and 27 member board, in their classically European Union égalité-style board room - concentric circles of seating, all fitted out with push button mikes, translation headphones - and a beautiful green forest just outside floor-to-ceiling glass windows on two sides.
This is a huge bank, nearly three times the size of the World Bank.
Today they're undertaking a first - a big "civil society consultation". It's question time. There are about 120 people sitting in the circles, two thirds of them representatives of NGOs of various sorts. The heat is on; Bankwatch people and others bring up examples of how they've messed up projects; they're accused of approving projects that shouldn't be going ahead, including still funding some coal fired power stations despite espousing a climate change focus (yes, they still funded €5 billion of fossil fuel investments last year). We all know there are 10 GWh of coal fired power station proposals coming from Poland.
Nick Mabey from E3G chimes in and says "The EIB should reflect the pioneering position of the EU" in relation to climate change. He's right of course. Imagine the impact they could have if they switched their fossil fuel lending to clean, and then leveraged up (not always done). I love the EIB - for what it's already doing, but most of all for what it can do.
But they have constraints - in particular incoherence among EU stakeholders. The EU sets tough emission reduction targets then countries like Slovenia and Poland quietly ignore them and push the EIB (they are shareholders) to fund dirty stuff on the grounds of energy security (i.e. avoid Russians). Renewables would give energy security as well of course.
But 40 EIB board and senior staff are here and listening - that's taking it seriously - and saying things like "we know we need to increase our energy efficiency lending in Eastern Europe" with some of them trying as hard as they can to say "we agree with you about coal" without actually saying it (body language is an amazing thing) because at the end of the day they will have to do what EU States decide.
So EU States are now the focus.
