Mr. Mauro Petriccione:

Deputy Eamon Ryan's question might cover much of what was asked by the various members. There is full respect for institutional relations and we will not interact with national parliaments in a way that diminishes the prerogative of national governments or interferes with the constitutional process in member states. It is not our role or mandate - that is anathema to us. We are talking about debate, information and analysis. Our job is to provide the whole of Europe with the best analysis, the best options and the best solutions we can devise. By definition, that includes, indeed prioritises, institutional actors in member states. We have neither the resources nor the role to regularly contact national parliaments directly. Nevertheless, the door of the Commission is open to any citizen who wants to communicate with us and, especially, to people's representatives. If this committee, or individual Members of the Irish Parliament, wish to continue this exchange, our doors are open, directly, in person or by electronic means. Our representations in member states are there to facilitate this exchange and we will do the best we can in this respect. I always tell people that I will answer their questions. If they want a fast answer, they should ask an urgent question but the resources of the Commission are what they are, while my Directorate-General has just 200 people to run the Europe-wide climate policy. To the despair of my staff, I spend 80% of my time having this kind of discussion. If there is anything missing from this conversation we will be very happy to provide it.

A question that was asked by many members was on house renovation. We see energy efficiency as a key to energy transformation. It has emerged, from the overall view of the national energy and climate plans for member states, that current plans and policies for energy efficiency are insufficient to reach the 32.5% target for 2030, let alone to be scaled up towards 2050, when we foresee a reduction of energy consumption by approximately 50% as necessary to achieve our objectives. That is a fact; it is not a statement that is meant to scare anybody.

The recommendation on the national plans which the Commission will issue in June identifies this as an area for priority action. We need to develop more and better ideas and better plans, measures and policies on energy efficiency. Building for innovation is crucial in that regard. Regulations for new buildings can always improve, but in our view they are more or less adequate. Renovation of existing buildings is a real issue. It is also the great reservoir of energy gains. The major stumbling block in that area is financing. It is not so much the cost of financing; we can always subsidise interest rates. Doing so is not very expensive. However, many individual homeowners, small enterprises running small clusters of business for residential or commercial rental purposes and local authorities managing social housing simply do not have a credit rating that enables them to borrow. Moreover, a publicly-financed mechanism cannot provide the necessary scale. By and large, this transformation cannot be paid for entirely out of the public purse. It is beyond our capability.

Having said that, we have strong evidence that there is massive interest in the private sector in contributing to this. There is capital in Europe in search of gainful employment. The issue concerns the measures to be taken. How do we bridge the gap between the availability of finance, the risk factor and the uses to which we want to direct it? It is possible but not easy. I have one practical example. We are, through the LIFE programme, financing a pilot project whereby the Commission will allocate a reasonable amount of funding to act as collateral for commercial loans. Over five years, this will amount to almost €150 million. It is beginning to work. It is not a subsidy to the bank or the owner. These are commercial loans, but the existence of public money as collateral lowers the risk profile of the borrowers and enables the commercial bank to make a loan it would otherwise find too risky. We have been struggling with this project because commercial banks are not used to it. They are not used to evaluating projects of this kind because they have considered them too risky. As such, they do not usually even look at them. Together with the European Investment Bank, we have had to invest money in programmes helping participating commercial banks to train staff to assess these loans quite apart from the question of the financial risk. They assess whether the borrower is trustworthy and carry out the rest of the commercial operations. It is now beginning to work. We must decide whether this project is worth completing and replicating or whether we should do something else.

One point we must put squarely on the table is that there should be collective work between European institutions, member states and the financial sector to devise mechanisms to bridge the gap between bringing about the climate transition and the availability of private capital, which is largely unemployed in Europe. One of the natural but unpleasant effects of the tightening of our credit system after the financial crash is that we have made our banking system much more risk-averse than before. As the members know, when we talk about appreciation of risk it is easy to swing in the opposite direction. We need a correction in that regard. There is appetite for that in the financial sector and work on it is afoot. It is not a simple issue but it is fundamental. Apart from energy efficiency, the side benefits of housing renovation in public health and quality of life are potentially enormous. There is a huge amount of real estate capital in Europe that could benefit. That is without even mentioning the situation in eastern Europe, where much of the housing stock dates from the Soviet era. Members can imagine the quality of that housing stock.

One of the members stated something that was spot on. Current plans are not the right type of thinking. The Commission maintains that this transformation requires a qualitative change in the way we think. Emissions reductions are no longer enough. Such reductions need to be capable of being scaled up towards zero. Not all policies are equally good in that respect. We need policies that are capable of transforming our economic model in a sustainable and potentially indefinite manner. They have to fit with other mega-trends. We cannot think of clean mobility and electric cars separately to the trend towards automated cars. This requires a radical change in the way we think. The way our world is developing will force that change on us regardless of whether we like it. We see the energy transformation and the climate transformation as one of the opportunities to take control of that process rather than being victims of it. We are not pretending it is easy; this is a generational challenge. We are going to be challenged regardless of what we do, so we might as well try to drive the process rather than be driven by it and possibly driven against a wall.

A member mentioned that the forestry model is not acceptable. That is true in many ways. That is why we are not proposing a European forestry model. Many of these policies can only be devised at local level. Our biggest policy is the Common Agricultural Policy, yet Irish representatives know better than many others how local that policy actually operates. Let us consider mobility. Other than in a small country, and I am not sure that Ireland qualifies as a small country for these purposes, mobility cannot be solved at a national level, let alone at European level. National governments can facilitate the transition, create infrastructure, help finance it and create the framework. They can create the compulsion to reduce CO2. However, mobility must be solved at the local level. It must be solved by local public transport, intra-urban and inter-urban transport and alternatives to individual mobility in the form of the car, such as the explosion of shared vehicles, electric bikes and scooters. In Brussels, five companies started offering electric scooters in the space of six months. Local authorities are becoming increasingly annoyed because these things are scattered all over the streets. They are now thinking of regulating the parking of electric scooters.