G7 commits to decarbonize its electricity by 2035

30-05-2022 by Mirai

The G7 countries pledged on Friday to decarbonize most of their electricity sector "by 2035" as well as to end all international financing for fossil fuel projects this year.

"We are committed to achieving a largely carbon-free electricity sector by 2035," they said in a statement issued after a meeting of climate and energy ministers in Berlin.

To achieve this goal, countries commit to "support the acceleration of the global phase-out of coal" and to "rapidly develop the technologies and policies necessary for the clean energy transition."

This is the first time that the seven industrial powers (the United States, Japan, Canada, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Germany) have jointly committed themselves to such a goal.

The ministers also promised to end foreign funding of fossil fuel projects without carbon capture technology by "the end of 2022".

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," Alden Meyer, an expert at the European think tank E3G, told AFP.

The G7 states also recalled their common goal of eliminating all direct subsidies for fossil fuels "by 2025", said Robert Habeck, German Minister for the 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 projects of this type worth 188,000 million dollars, mainly through multilateral development banks.