G7 pledges to quit fossil fuels faster, but no new deadline

Sapporo, Japan (AFP):

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 deadlines 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 put forward a new goal of ending “unabated” coal power in G7 electricity systems this decade.

But with global energy supplies still squeezed by the war in Ukraine, the target faced pushback from other members, including bloc president 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 to be held in Dubai this November.