It has taken a while but it's finally done and dusted: we have a new European Commission.

Although a lot of media and public attention has been going to Mr Barroso's new team, a lot of power is actually in the hands of officials that the average European never gets to see or hear about. These are the members of the different cabinets, the private offices of the commissioners.

It is surprising, if not worrying, to see that for 27 EU commissioners there is no single senior Cabinet member from Poland, let alone a Head of Cabinet. Why not? Poland has been a Member of the European Union for long enough to be considered equal when it comes to such strategic appointments. More than half a decade since Poland's accession, there are plenty of competent Polish officials who know how to navigate the Brussels bureaucracy and its political intricacies.

Members of cabinet are appointed by every commissioner personally, in a rather opaque process and without much accountability.

Often times they largely determine their commissioner's agenda. A commissioner typically surrounds him- or herself with about six or seven of these confidants whose topical knowledge is often limited but whose political intuition is all the more outspoken.

The Polish commissioner, Janusz Lewandowski, picked a Luxembourgian Head of Cabinet, Marc Lemaître. In fact, Mr Lewandowski has only two other Poles among his private staff, Angelika Chomicka and Przemysław Słowik. This would all be fine, if it wasn't for the fact that commissioners from other countries - in particular the usual suspects such as France, Germany, and Spain - appoint their compatriots, and often their political friends, to highly influential and very well-paid posts in their private offices.

These people do push a national agenda although they are in fact not supposed to. Strategic posts in the key Cabinets of Competition, Internal Market and Industry, are full of French, Italians and Spaniards, especially now that some of these legacy Member States start realizing that the end may be near for the more-than-average privileges they have enjoyed for so long.

A missed opportunity for Mr Lewandowski and Poland? A lack of involvement from Warsaw in what are important decisions for Poland's future in the EU game? Stay tuned.

On a recent Friday in Brussels, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso presented his new team of Commissioners and their respective portfolios for the next five years. For the first time in recent history, that new Commission was not announced on the fringes of a meeting of EU heads of state, which may give the innocent bystander the impression that Barroso made his choice relatively independently of the member states.

Nothing is further from the truth – of course a great deal of horse-trading went on behind the scenes, it was just better concealed than usual.

The result is that France gets the internal market, a political lightweight from Spain gets competition, Germany gets energy (watch that space), and Janusz Lewandowski from Poland gets the budget.

Does that mean Poland will act as Europe’s budget guardian for the next five years? No it doesn’t.

The fact that the post is currently held by the Commissioner from Lithuania should say enough about its weight. The reality is that the member states set the true budgetary guidelines for the Union, while the Commissioner in charge has very limited influence and is mainly charged with overseeing the number crunchers.

The argument for giving Poland a second-tier portfolio yet again was the appointment, several months ago, of Jerzy Buzek as President of the European Parliament. And whether Buzek will be the influential and important Polish representative in Brussels so urgently needed remains to be seen, as it is up to the man himself – and he is the first parliament president under the newly ratified Lisbon Treaty which extended the chamber’s powers – to redefine the job.

While a lot can be said about the workings of the European Parliament and the lack of a genuine majority-versus-opposition framework which we are familiar with in our parliamentary democracies, Buzek has the key to taking the parliament’s role to the next level and changing the house into the true third EU institution with real influence.

Time will tell whether he will, and whether the reason he was picked for the job is that at the end of the day, that he won’t.

Buzek’s first real job will be the approval of the new Commission in late January, and most analysts already expect that this will happen without much resistance. The choice of Commissioners is the result of such a delicate acte de balance, and no one would really want to upset that.

And so the wheels on the Brussels machine continue to go round and round, round and round, for yet another year. From Brussels, a Merry Christmas and Happy 2010. And stay tuned, there’s more to come.

The one question that keeps Brussels, and many in Europe, busy these days is who will become the first permanent President of the European Council, and who will serve as its Foreign Minister. There is wild speculation – dozens of names are being bandied about – and Sweden's duo of Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt and Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, charged with finding the five-legged sheep, keep saying they are “not there yet but in politics three days is practically an eternity.” The final decision is to emerge from an informal dinner of EU leaders in Brussels this Thursday. And then we'll know.

Care to venture a guess, though? With Tony Blair's name pretty much off the table, it seems that what the assembled heads of state and government want for the post is not a strong leader, but a discreet administrator – yet another one. Among the names that are circulating are those of the respective current Prime Ministers of all three Benelux countries. Belgium's Herman Van Rompuy is said to have the best chances, with almost all of the 27 delegations seemingly backing him.

Almost all, that is, as Van Rompuy is thought to have secured the UK's support by overtly giving preference to a British running mate for the post of EU Foreign Minister. Now, with both David Milliband and Lord Peter Mandelson having declined interest, the UK is more likely to support Dutch Prime Minister Jan-Peter Balkenende. In the view of the Brits, Balkenende is less federalist than the Belgian. And federalism is something our friends from across the Channel do not approve of too much.

As recently as this Monday, current EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said in an FT opinion piece that the right man for the right job ... might be a woman. She got immediate backing from other European women in power, and from Europe's women's rights lobby. Irish President Mary Robinson and Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga are the only women who are more or less official candidates for the job. But while Ireland has a bit of an image problem in Europe, it may be too early to pick the first EU president from a new member state. However, Mrs Vike-Freiberga would probably be a much better choice than some of the Benelux pencil pushers.

It is hard to predict anything in politics, and it is practically impossible to predict anything in European politics. But it is rather likely that either Belgium's Van Rompuy or Balkenende from the Netherlands will on Thursday be able to call himself the first President of Europe. And if Italy's former communist Massimo D'Alema can avert a Polish veto and Romania's outsider candidate Adrian Severin can get the support of his own government, one of those two may well be the next EU Foreign Minister. But then again, as so often happens in Brussels, it may all come out differently.

How ironic is it to see the esteemed Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, travel to Paris for a meeting with French President, Nicholas Sarkozy, mere days after an EU agreement was reached on significant emissions reduction targets (see “A new, 'green' gold rush,” posted here on October 29). An agreement which requires above average efforts from Poland and the other new member states and which, as outlined more fully in said blog post, could present major opportunities for true innovation in the energy sector.

But one could ask the question of whether rushing to Paris for a meeting with France’s senior salesman, and returning with one, or even two, nuclear power plants, is really the best way to respond to this call for innovation. Should Poland pour so much tax money into a technology that is 40 years old has meanwhile been surpassed? Should such tax money be used to buy a turnkey product that offers little transfer of knowledge and intellectual property? And, last but not least, how ethical is it to buy a technology from a country which is shamelessly selling out that same technology to the Iran of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

Understandably, France’s aging nuclear-energy sector (the country’s first nuclear power plant was completed in 1956 and was then a novelty), which grew beyond proportion due to massive government subsidies to industry giants such as former Framatome and today’s Aveva and EDF, is in dire need of new markets to whom it can sell its sub-par technology, especially in times when many other European countries consider this technology antiquated and are looking into more modern solutions.

The French nuclear industry and the government with which it is so intertwined, have been turning to Northern Africa and the Middle East in their effort to convince new potential buyers. In this context, the set of energy and climate targets concluded at the recent EU Summit turns out to be a rather self-fulfilling prophecy for France, a door opener to provide quick but not necessary future-proof ways for Poland and its neighbors to deliver on their political promises. Mr Tusk’s plan is therefore a rush decision and it is unlikely to be in Poland’s interest in the long-term.

The Polish government must duly consider whether it wants to fund yesterday’s technology, or whether it instead wants to go one step further and invest in building the competence at home that will ensure truly sustainable energy provision.

The European Council Summit that is currently going on in Brussels is one of the more ambitious of its kind, with its main objective being the development of a “common” EU negotiating position for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen, a little over a month away.

The draft conclusions, which I was able to consult and which are being discussed by the EU’s heads of state and government as I write this, speak of an envisaged reduction of carbon emissions of up to 95 percent by 2050 (when compared to 1990 levels), at least by developed nations. The EU has already committed to a 30 percent reduction by 2020, but one may ask whether 95 percent isn’t overly ambitious. What is certain is that the “old” EU member states are likely to be asked to make more significant efforts than the “new” member states, and rightfully so. We saw the same scenario emerging from the discussions on targets for 2020, earlier this year.

What is equally interesting to see are the astonishing amounts of money the EU believes will be required to reduce the carbon footprint of the developing world. By 2020, developing countries alone will require €100 billion per year to finance so-called mitigation and adaptation efforts. These efforts are to be funded in part from the budgets of these nations themselves, but largely through the international carbon market and international public finance. The level of international public support, i.e. development aid, is estimated at €22-50 billion per year by 2020.

A number of reflections: At the EU level we are looking at a significant effort. And there is a lot of work that must, or rather can, be done by the “new” member states to catch up. Derogation is likely, and rightfully so, and the burden on Poland and the likes will presumably be lower. Nevertheless, significant public funding will be required (and must be assigned), in particular to bring the Polish energy sector up to speed with international standards, and to achieve real improvements. Poland has the right cards and can become a leader of renewable energy, if it wants to and if the government is ready to create the right framework and provide the right means.

What the above-mentioned figures show is the potential size of the so-called “green” economy. Whereas one can waste a lot of time in dispute over the seriousness of certain climate change arguments, it sometimes simply makes more sense to look at things in a pragmatic way. It is now clearer than ever that there is a very strong political commitment to assign unseen amounts of money to changing the way we produce energy. And this commitment presents visionary entrepreneurs with opportunities to become part of that growing “green” economy. Let’s reminisce for a moment about the gold rushes in the 19th-century Wild West: it was not the gold diggers that made the biggest fortunes, it was those that sold them their spades. More than ever, stay tuned.