Irish-based banks and other financial institutions have channelled almost €6bn worth of investment into fossil fuels and other environmentally harmful industries in poor countries, a global study shows.
Ireland needs to tackle this by getting EU-wide consensus. It already has tough climate requirements for domestic banks, these banks are foreign subsidiaries (mostly American) based in Dublin to be in the EU. If just one EU country gets tough on them, they’ll move to another. This action needs to be tied to their access to Europe & done at the EU-level.
Since they are US banks, they would just move the financing to the US, which is no problem as most of it is already fairly US centric. That is also true for all large EU banks. They all are also in the US and other countries.
The other big problem is that the EU still uses fossil fuels, so cutting it is not possible without causing supply problems, if not done right.
Ireland needs to tackle this by getting EU-wide consensus. It already has tough climate requirements for domestic banks, these banks are foreign subsidiaries (mostly American) based in Dublin to be in the EU. If just one EU country gets tough on them, they’ll move to another. This action needs to be tied to their access to Europe & done at the EU-level.
Since they are US banks, they would just move the financing to the US, which is no problem as most of it is already fairly US centric. That is also true for all large EU banks. They all are also in the US and other countries.
The other big problem is that the EU still uses fossil fuels, so cutting it is not possible without causing supply problems, if not done right.
No, they are in Ireland because the EU requires some of their operations to physically be located in the EU, to have access to the EU single market.