The G7 climate and energy ministers gathered in Berlin are preparing to decarbonize the electricity sector by 2035.
Le Monde with AFP
This is the first time that the seven industrial powers (United States, Japan, Canada, France, Italy, United Kingdom, Germany) have set themselves such a objective. The countries of the G7 committed themselves on Friday, May 27, to decarbonize the majority of their sector as well as to end any international funding of projects related to fossil fuels this year.
“We are committed to reaching an electricity sector mainly decarbonated by 2035,” they said in a statement published after a meeting of climate and energy ministers in Berlin . To achieve this objective, the countries promise to “support the acceleration of the world’s exit of coal” and “quickly develop the technologies and policies necessary for the transition to clean energy”.
The ministers also ensured to put an end to the funding abroad of fossil fuels without carbon capture technique by “end of 2022”. This announcement was allowed thanks to a turnaround in Japan, the last country of the group which refused to engage on this question.
Twenty countries, including the other G7 states, had already signed a statement in this direction last November, during COP 26 in Glasgow. “It is good that Japan, the leading fossil fuels in the world, joined other G7 countries,” commented to the France-Presse Alden Meyer agency, expert for the European think tank E3G.
Delete direct subsidies with fossil fuels
The G7 states have also recalled their common objective to suppress any direct subsidy with fossil fuels “by 2025”. “Rewarding a behavior harmful to the climate with subsidies (…) is absurd and this absurdity must be eliminated,” commented Robert Habeck, the German Minister of Economy and Climate, during a press conference on Friday .
According to the NGO Oil Change International, between 2018 and 2020, the only countries of the G20 financed such projects up to $ 188 billion, mainly via multilateral development banks.