This is the first time that the seven industrial powers (United States, Japan, Canada, France, Italy, United Kingdom, Germany) have set such a goal together. The G7 countries pledged on Friday, May 27 to decarbonize the majority of their electricity sector as well as to end all international financing for fossil fuel projects as of this year.
“We are committed to achieving a majority carbon-free electricity sector by 2035”, they said in a statement released after a meeting of climate and energy ministers in Berlin. To achieve this goal, countries pledge to “support the acceleration of the global exit from coal” et “rapidly develop the technologies and policies necessary for the transition to clean energy”.
Ministers also pledged to end overseas funding of fossil fuel projects without carbon capture technology by « fin 2022 ». This announcement was made possible thanks to a reversal of Japan, the last country in the group which refused to commit to this question.
Twenty countries, including the other G7 states, had already signed a declaration to this effect last November, during COP 26 in Glasgow. “It is good that Japan, the world’s largest financier of fossil fuels, has joined the other G7 countries,” commented to Agence France-Presse Alden Meyer, expert for the European think tank E3G.
Eliminate direct subsidies to fossil fuels
The G7 states also recalled their common objective of eliminating all direct subsidies to fossil fuels “by 2025”. “Rewarding climate-damaging behavior with subsidies (…)it is nonsense and this nonsense 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 G20 countries alone financed such projects to the tune of 188 billion dollars, mainly through multilateral development banks.