The G7 countries pledged on Friday to decarbonize the majority of their electricity sector “by 2035”, as well as to end all international funding for fossil fuel projects 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, the countries pledge “to support the acceleration of the global phase-out of coal” and to “rapidly develop the technologies and policies necessary for the transition to clean energy”.
This is the first time that the seven industrial powers (United States, Japan, Canada, France, Italy, United Kingdom, Germany) have committed together to such an objective.
The ministers also promised to end foreign financing of fossil fuel projects without carbon capture technology by “the end of 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 fossil fuel funder, has joined the other G7 countries,” Alden Meyer, expert for the European Think Tank E3G, told AFP.
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 absurd and this absurdity must be eliminated”, commented Robert Habeck the German Minister for the Economy and the 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 via multilateral development banks.