Another Climate Action Plan?
Did you hear about that final warning from scientists? The IPCC completed a report, 8 years in the making, that lays out everything we know about the climate crisis and made one last attempt for a call to action. Thankfully, it seems that the message hasn’t gone entirely ignored, with a new green energy economy action plan coming out of the G7 summit.
The plan will incentivise investment into clean energy and decarbonising innovations, enable the transition to electricity, and scale low-carbon technologies, including wind and solar PV. It’s hoped that this will mean relying on clean energy and working within a circular economy will become the logical and easy way of running a business.
A statement from the committee reads, “We, the leaders of the G7, are acting and enhancing cooperation to address the climate crisis and accelerate the global clean energy transition to reach net zero emissions by 2050 at the latest.”
This green energy economy action plan follows on from the Paris agreement commitment, utilising international collaboration to bring about a shared global intention to reach our collective climate goals. While it’s important for world leaders to get together and commit to climate targets, critics claim that many of these plans lack urgency and don’t make clear how they intend to meet their goals. Perhaps this new framework will amend this?
The plan focuses on the green energy economy, which we’ll need to be strong if it’s going to support global decarbonisation. The plan, in part, aims to lower the price of renewable energy, making it an even more economically viable alternative to fossil fuels. The G7 also recognises that investment is needed in order to properly scale the solutions we’ll need in order to reach our climate targets.
Is it urgent enough?
According to the IEA, with this plan in place, we could hope to bring down G7 natural gas production to below 2% by 2035. And by the same year, 40% of homes in G7 countries will be heated with electricity. As part of reaching net-zero by 2050, the plan involves installing heat pumps in two thirds of homes and powering 60% of transport with electricity by the same year.
So, is this good enough? It’s hard to measure, as really, nothing short of stopping yesterday will be good enough. Critics point out that many of the climate action plans agreed upon by world leaders don’t have the needed investment. And as we get closer to the 1.5C warming limit, scientists continue to warn that we aren’t doing enough. Unfortunately, many of the issues we face when tackling the climate crisis are actually economic and diplomatic hurdles. This green energy plan from the G7 is certainly an encouraging step in the right direction, but as ever, we need more investment and we need it sooner.
UN secretary general, António Guterres, has said “Our world needs climate action on all fronts: everything, everywhere, all at once”.
In short, the G7 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US) has announced a new green economy action plan which will strengthen investment into clean energy technologies, enable the development and deployment of clean-tech and encourage widespread decarbonisation. It’s an exciting move, making a clean energy transition a little more achievable. Do you think this will be enough? Let us know in the comments!
