G7 agrees to close coal plants by 2035, says UK minister

Group of Seven ministers have agreed to close all their coal plants by 2035 at the latest, a UK minister said on Monday, in a breakthrough in climate policy that could influence other countries to do the same. .

Setting an end date for coal – the most climate-polluting fossil fuel – has been highly controversial in international climate negotiations. Japan, which will get 32% of its electricity from coal in 2023, according to climate think tank Ember, has blocked progress on the issue at previous G7 meetings, the report said. CNN previously.

“We have an agreement to phase out coal in the first half of the 2030s,” Andrew Bowie, UK minister at the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, told Class CNBC in Turing, Italy. “By the way, this is a historic agreement, something we were unable to achieve at COP28 in Dubai last year.”

“So to have the G7 countries gathered around the table to send that signal to the world – that we, the world’s advanced economies, are committed to phasing out coal by the early 2030s – is pretty incredible.”

When asked to confirm the development, the UK Ministry of Energy and Net Zero pointed the interview to CNN .

The US State Department declined to comment on the G7 agreement. Last week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced new rules that will require coal-fired power plants to capture nearly all of their climate pollution or close by 2039.

Many of the other G7 nations already have national plans in place to phase out fossil fuels. About 16% of the G7's electricity comes from coal, Ember reports.

“This is another nail in the coffin for coal,” said Dave Jones, director of Ember’s Global Insights program. “The journey to phasing out coal power has been a long one: it’s been more than seven years since the UK, France, Italy and Canada committed to phasing out coal power, so it’s good to see the United States and especially Japan finally be more explicit about their intentions.”

He warned, however, that although coal power is falling, gas consumption continues. “Coal may be the dirtiest, but all fossil fuels ultimately need to be phased out,” he said.

Fossil fuels are the main cause of the climate crisis. Almost every country in the world agreed last year to abandon fossil fuels at the COP28 climate talks in Dubai, but failing to set an end date for coal was seen as a shortcoming of those talks.

The energy, environment and climate ministers meet in Turin for negotiations that are expected to end on Tuesday (30).

The G7 – made up of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, with the European Union as a special status member – typically leads global climate policy. The group's decisions often reverberate or influence the entire G20, which includes other major emitters such as China and India, as well as major fossil fuel producers such as Saudi Arabia and Russia.