The group of the major economic powers (G20) apparently cannot agree on concrete goals for climate protection at its summit in Rome. This emerges from a recent draft of the final communiqué that was submitted to the German Press Agency. Originally intended targets and specific commitments to combat dangerous global warming from earlier versions have been deleted.
The two-day summit of heads of state and government ends this Sunday in the Italian capital, while Scotland begins the two-week climate change meeting (COP26). At the invitation of the United Nations, government representatives from around 200 countries spent two weeks in Glasgow discussing how mankind can curb accelerated global warming to a tolerable level. 25,000 people, including thousands of journalists and climate protection activists, were expected.
In the draft for the final communiqué of the G20 summit, there was no longer even an agreement on “immediate action”, as it was called in an earlier draft. There has also been no progress towards the goal of carbon dioxide neutrality. The target date originally set for 2050 is now more generally referred to as “the middle of the century”. Obviously, this was also done out of consideration for China. The largest producer of carbon dioxide had only committed to this until 2060.
The group of economic powers plays an important role because it is responsible for around 80 percent of global greenhouse gases. While the positions of the G20 on climate protection differed widely, there was, however, a far-reaching agreement in Rome on plans for a planned expansion of the vaccination rate against the coronavirus worldwide, as the draft further shows.
The G20 supports the goals of the World Health Organization (WHO) to want to vaccinate at least 40 percent of “the population in all countries” by the end of the year. By the middle of next year it should be 70 percent. The host, Italy’s Prime Minister Mario Draghi, criticized the great differences in vaccination progress. While in rich countries around 70 percent of the population are vaccinated at least once, the rate in the poorest countries falls to three percent. These differences are “morally unacceptable”.
Merkel, Scholz and also Biden meet Erdogan
The only executive Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) will meet Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for the second time within just two weeks on Sunday on the sidelines of the summit – but this time her Finance Minister and likely successor Olaf Scholz (SPD) will be there. The conversation is likely to focus on the diplomatic crisis that has just been averted about the entrepreneur and human rights activist Osman Kavala, who has been imprisoned for four years.
Erdogan had accused the ambassadors of Germany, the USA and eight other Western countries meddling and threatened them with expulsion. A declaration by individual ambassadors, which Erdogan saw as giving in, prevented the scandal.
US President Joe Biden also wanted to meet Erdogan on Sunday, a senior White House official said. It will be about the situation in the crisis countries Libya and Syria, but also about the controversial purchase of the Russian missile defense system S-400 by Turkey. The USA had therefore excluded the NATO partner from an important armaments project, the development of the F-35 fighter aircraft.
Biden urges implementation of the Nord Stream 2 agreement
Biden had already met Merkel and Scholz on Saturday, the first day of the summit. The US President emphasized the importance of the German-American agreement on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. In it, Germany undertakes to prevent Russia from politically instrumentalizing natural gas exports – especially against Ukraine. Should a traffic light alliance between the SPD, the Greens and the FDP come about, the positions of the coalition partners on Nord Stream 2 would diverge very widely. The Greens are strictly against the project, while Scholz’s SPD is more in favor of it.
Nord Stream 2 was a main point of contention in German-American relations, especially in the era of US President Donald Trump. Another transatlantic dispute was settled in Rome. The USA reached an agreement with the EU on the provisional settlement of its longstanding dispute over American special tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. Both sides declared that on Saturday evening on the sidelines of the summit meeting. According to US information, the agreement in principle provides that the EU states may in future import certain quantities of the materials into the USA duty-free. In addition, both parties are therefore suspending pending proceedings before the bodies of the World Trade Organization (WTO).