End of fossil fuel subsidies by 2021
1 Trillion € (1000 Billion) climate investment between 2020 and 2030
Alignment of all EIB Group with the Paris Agreement
Good? Yes, no, maybe so?
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ping @alberto @martin @sander @ilaria @pbihr @zelf @thornet @eb4890 relevant to your work / interests?
To me: good, very good. This is a political decision, quite radical, and this input will have financial consequences on a large scale, because a lot of private banks tend to align to EIB.
This is not immediately related to what we are doing now, but in a broader sense and term, it is.
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Well that didn’t take long - I guess this is a reminder that the devil is in the details
Thank you !!
Of course it’s good, I don’t see how fossil fuel industry can need any subsidies 
Just for reference:
You can invest into gas power plant being built in India to offset your Carbon footprint e.g. via UN FCCC, fully gold certified and all (can’t find the exact one anymore, maybe sold out).
If it reduces CO2 output (and some other nasty impacts) effectively, IMO it should be fair game in the intermediate time frame. More context here: Environmental Impacts of Natural Gas | Union of Concerned Scientists
What freaks me out in e.g. German energy policy is that they did not shift heavily into (their newly built!) gas capacity after starting to phase out nukes. They even built almost no new wind power! There are many things where you can give the benefit of doubt, or careful incrementalism - but those really aren’t.
I’d love to have the option of living (almost) directly under a wind power plant if - why are there no “market forces” allowed to counter that sort of NIMBYsm?
If the EIB thing can catalyze some of the processes around that then they get my hooray.
Edit: here are some: CDM: CDM-Home
What did the Germans do instead?
They put much of their gas capacity on hold and continued to use coal, bizarrely even discussing adding coal capacity.
They sold out the PV industry, and are in the process of ruining the wind industry if they go on like that.
They are doing some research on improving gas as small combined heat and power option, but the conventional ICE’s (also the big ones) are too leaky for it burn the methane well enough. VW had some hopes of getting into residential markets there. My guess is that EcoMotors - Wikipedia is likely the best concept to pursue in that context and I’ve pitched it to someone in the German gov who works in the gas-cogeneration field. Who knows, maybe this can be an incremental improvement and help with intermittency issues.
They (although I think mainly Spain and France) buy some LNG from the US (for a high price) as a political gesture.
Northern Germany is pretty full of wind power already as per current building codes, and it is making good money and jobs. Sadly one of the pioneers is laying off 3000 people now because there was no wind energy capacity added this year in Germany. Offshore is understandably slow.
At the same time the center left party (SPD) is having a very hard time to let the lignite(!) lobby down that represents a mere 5000 jobs. In my opinion some things are really out of kilter there. Same with discussion about urban particle pollution from cars - you should have seen some of the comments made by “serious people” in prime time talk shows and how EU rules were portrayed.
Sadly I suspect there to be a pretty strong demographic barrier to changing many of these things politically (via votes) in the German case.
wow - did not know any of this.