Ribera: “Clean technologies financed by non-Western banks.” Is China funding the Green Deal?

Brussels – China and India are ultimately driving the sustainable transition. Not so much with their policies but through their lending institutions because, upon closer inspection, “much of the clean technology is financed by non-Western banks,” the European Commission’s Executive Vice-President in charge of Clean Transition, Teresa Ribera, denounced at the World Economic Forum in Davos: investments that matter, in terms of clean-tech and eco-tech solutions, are not in Europe and even less so across the Atlantic.

The alarm that Ribera launches lies here, with the call to “create collaborative platforms” that are useful to finance new solutions that will help with the transition, especially in areas worldwide where wind farms or photovoltaic parks may be a future-proof solution. “Africa and South America have great expectations” along with great potential, Ribera stressed. Too bad that in Africa, the battle between traditional sources with high climate impact and strong CO2 footprint and clean energy from renewable sources has already begun.

“Since the Paris climate accords were signed, the world’s 60 major banks have spent $6.9 trillion on fossil fuels,” denounced Al Gore, former U.S. vice president and one of the best-known voices on environmentalism. “The fossil fuel lobby is spending” massively, and the result is that “Africa is overbuilding pipelines,” blatantly disregarding the ambitions of a green economy, on which there are doubts.

The Europe of the Green Deal risks losing the clean transition race because of the banking sector. It will take a significant push to reshape the asset portfolio of lending institutions. From this point of view, the EU has a ‘small’ value added: on the one hand, the European Central Bank is starting to put climate change issues at the center of its agenda, and thus to its loans to the Eurosystem. On the other hand, the European Investment Bank (EIB) is determined to finance sustainability, provided that the new needs to stimulate the defense industry do not redesign the nature of EIB loans. For now, however, everything is not in the hands of Westerners. The Chinese and Indians are financing the transition.