The G7 industrialized countries pledged on Sunday to “accelerate” their “exit” from fossil fuels in all sectors, but without setting a new deadline, and decided to jointly aim for zero new plastic pollution by 2040. Their promise to get out of fossil fuels (oil, gas, coal) does not, however, concern those with CO2 capture and storage devices, says the joint communiqué of the G7 climate, energy and environment ministers, meeting since Saturday in Sapporo (northern Japan).
Instead of a specific timetable, these major industrialized countries (the United States, Japan, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Canada) more vaguely include this goal in their efforts to achieve energy carbon neutrality by 2050 “at the latest. They had already committed last year to decarbonize the majority of their electricity sectors by 2035, a goal reconfirmed on Sunday.
In a sign of difficult negotiations, they were unable to agree on a date for phasing out coal in the electricity sector, even though the United Kingdom, supported by France, had proposed a deadline of 2030. On the environmental front, the G7 countries have pledged to reduce their additional plastic pollution to zero by 2040, including through the circular economy, reducing or abandoning disposable and non-recyclable plastics.
Germany, France, the EU, the UK and Canada are already part of an international coalition that made the same commitment last year. But this is the first time that the United States, Japan and Italy have joined them. This is a “strong signal” before the next negotiation session of an international treaty on plastics in late May in Paris, welcomed in a statement the French Minister of Ecological Transition Christophe Béchu.
The issue is crucial: the amount of plastic waste has doubled in the world in twenty years, and only 9% of it is actually recycled, according to the OECD. And the UN estimates that the amount of plastic dumped into the oceans will nearly triple by 2040.
“Important point of support”
The decision to move away from all fossil fuels marks a “strong step forward”, also welcomed in an interview with AFP the French Minister for Energy Transition Agnès Pannier-Runacher. “This is an important point of support to be able to extend this approach” to the G20 in India and to the UN climate conference (COP28) in Dubai at the end of the year,” she said, while admitting that these future global negotiations “are not going to be easy”.
The G7 members had to show unity and voluntarism after the latest alarming summary report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published in March. According to the IPCC, global warming caused by human activity will reach 1.5°C compared to the pre-industrial era by the years 2030-2035.
This further jeopardizes the 2015 Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting temperature rise to that level, or at least well below 2°C. The G7 also reaffirmed on Sunday its commitment to work with other developed countries to raise $100 billion a year for emerging countries to combat global warming, a pledge dating back to 2009 that was originally intended to be met by 2020. A summit to improve access to climate financing for developing countries, a sensitive and crucial issue, is scheduled for the end of June in Paris.
“It still lacks ambition”
Because of the very tense global geopolitical context with the war in Ukraine since last year and Japan’s conservative proposals on natural gas, environmental NGOs feared that the Sapporo meeting would result in a regression. The G7 recognized, as it did last year, that investments in natural gas “may be appropriate” to help some countries through the current energy crisis. But the primacy of a “clean” energy transition and the need to reduce gas demand were emphasized at the same time.
The other Japanese proposal to have ammonia and hydrogen recognized as “clean” co-fuels for thermal power plants was also surrounded by safeguards. These technologies must be developed from “low carbon and renewable” sources, the G7 insisted. Japan’s Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry (Meti) Yasutoshi Nishimura, however, said he was pleased that the G7 recognized “various paths to carbon neutrality.
Interviewed by AFP, the head of the International Energy Agency (IEA) Fatih Birol also welcomed a message from the G7 “combining our concerns for energy security while providing a roadmap to address the climate crisis. Environmental NGOs, on the other hand, were disappointed. “Regardless of the rhetorical games played by the G7 ministers, new gas investments (…) cannot be compatible” with their climate goals, criticized Collin Rees of Oil Change International. “There is some positive news” in the G7 announcements “but it still lacks ambition” to match the stakes, also estimated Daniel Read of Greenpeace.
