SAPPORO, (Japan): The G7 pledged on Sunday to quit fossil fuels faster and urged other countries to follow suit, but failed to agree to any new deadlines on ending polluting power sources like coal.
The language reflects the depth of disagreements among the allies on the balance between climate action and energy security, with host Japan leading a pushback against the most ambitious proposals discussed.
After two days of talks in the northern city of Sapporo, the bloc’s climate and environment ministers vowed to “accelerate the phase-out of unabated fossil fuels so as to achieve net zero in energy systems by 2050 at the latest... and call on others to join us in taking the same action”.
But they offered no new timelines beyond last year’s G7 pledge to largely end fossil fuel use in their electricity sectors by 2035.
France’s energy transition minister Agnes Pannier-Runacher said the “phase-out” wording was nonetheless a “strong step forward” ahead of the G20 and COP28 summits.
Britain and France had suggested a new goal of ending “unabated” coal power — which does not take steps to offset emissions — in G7 power grids this decade.
But with global energy supplies still squeezed by the war in Ukraine, the target faced opposition from other members, including Japan and the United States.
“I would obviously have liked to have been able to make a commitment to phase out coal by 2030,” Pannier-Runacher told AFP.
But “it is one issue on which we can still make progress in forthcoming discussions, particularly at COP28”, the UN climate conference in Dubai set for November.
The Group of Seven industrialised nations, which also includes Germany, Italy, Canada and the EU, pledged to end new plastic pollution by 2040.
Britain, Canada and the EU already belong to an international coalition with the same goal, but this is the first time Japan and the United States have made the 2040 commitment. Plastic waste has doubled globally in two decades and only nine percent is successfully recycled, the OECD says.
The G7 ministers also urged a peak in global greenhouse emissions by 2025 at the latest — language that experts say is aimed at the world’s largest carbon emitter, China, which is targeting its own 2030 peak. Other topics proved more divisive.
The ministers had been under pressure to announce bold steps after a major UN climate report warned last month that global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius would be seen in about a decade without “rapid and far-reaching” action.
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