Ministers do not give any deadlines
G7 countries want to say goodbye to fossil fuels more quickly
04/16/2023, 2:11 p.m
At the meeting of the G7 environment ministers in Japan, there is talk of a “big step forward”. Because the member states want to speed up the switch to renewable energies. However, what that will look like in concrete terms remains an open question.
The G7 countries have committed to an accelerated exit from fossil fuels – without naming specific deadlines for individual measures. The G7 countries promised to “accelerate the phase-out of (…) fossil fuels in order to achieve net-zero emissions in the energy systems by 2050 at the latest,” declared the climate and environment ministers of the leading industrialized nations after two days of talks in the northern Japanese city of Sapporo.
In the statement, the G7 members also called on other states to join the commitment. However, they did not set any specific deadlines that go beyond the measures agreed last year with the goal of a decarbonized power supply by 2035.
With a view to the forthcoming G20 and COP28 summits this year, France’s Energy Minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher nevertheless spoke of “a big step forward”: “The most important progress we have made is (…) that we agreed to move away from fossil fuels without carbon offsetting,” she said.
Disagreement over coal supply
As a new deadline, Great Britain and France had proposed ending “unchecked” coal-fired power generation – in which no measures are taken to offset emissions – in the G7 countries within this decade. However, due to the energy crisis triggered by the war in Ukraine, this goal was rejected by other members, including Japan and the United States. The group of seven industrialized countries, which also includes Germany, Italy and Canada, is aiming for net zero emissions by 2050.
After a UN climate report last month warned that without “rapid and far-reaching” action on global warming, the target limit of 1.5 degrees could be reached in about a decade, environment ministers were under pressure to take ambitious steps to announce. At the meeting in Japan, countries also agreed to end plastic pollution in their countries by 2040.