German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said she disapproves from the European Investment Bank's decision to ban funding for natural gas projects after 2023, days following the German government decided to the new guidelines.
Merkel criticised the ecu Investment Bank's (EIB) decision to ban funding for gas projects by the end of 2023. As Germany exits both nuclear and coal, gas is needed like a bridging technology within the energy transition, Merkel said in a parliamentary speech around the 2023 federal budget.
“That is the reason why I find it rather complicated that the European Investment Bank decided to no more finance gas as a bridging technology. I don't think that this really is right,” Merkel told parliamentarians. The German government supported the EIB's decision to end gas lending earlier this year.
In a parallel speech within the European Parliament, European Commission president-elect Ursula von der Leyen praised the EIB’s decision, saying she was happy concerning the “progress” made “to strengthen its role as EU climate bank.”
Alexander Reitzenstein, climate and energy policy advisor at the environmental think-tank E3G, called Merkel's remarks “a shocking and surprising statement” because of the German support a bit more than the usual week earlier.
Before supporting the EIB’s decision, the German government had initially opposed the bank’s intends to purge its loan books of fossil fuels, including natural gas, by 2023, based on reports.
German economy minister Peter Altmaier previously insisted that gas like a “bridging technology” would “remain an important component of Germany's energy supply system for several years.” Germany owns 16% from the EIB’s shares.
While the chancellor criticised the bank’s decision in Berlin, president-elect of the European Commission Ursula Von der Leyen – a detailed Merkel-ally and a person in Merkel’s Conservative CDU party – lauded the “progress” the bank made “to strengthen its role as EU climate bank.”
In her speech within the European Parliament in front of a vote to verify the brand new European Commission, Von der Leyen said if there was an area where the world needed EU leadership, it was on protecting the climate. “Climate change is all about many of us. We've the job to do something and the capacity to lead,” she said.
Merkel named global warming as one of two main problems that are crucial for Germany's future economy, prosperity and jobs – another being digitalisation – and highlighted Germany's role. “If a country like Germany represents one percent from the world's population and causes two percent of CO emissions and has the very best technologies, who if not we ought to show that it is possible to counter climate change?” she said.
She also warned of the urban-rural division: “If we as politicians don't help those in the city with affordable living and people in rural areas who discuss what they profit from wind power expansion aside from a 220-metre-high turbine right alongside them, only then do we won't succeed” using the energy transition, she said.
