The ongoing war in Ukraine and the fighting in Gaza following Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack must not distract the world from our collective priorities: reducing our carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, aiming for carbon neutrality by 2050, preserving biodiversity, and fighting poverty and inequality.
This is the doctrine France is implementing at an international level, through the Paris Pact for People and the Planet and the One Planet summits. The cornerstone of our strategy must be to speed up the ecological transition as well as the fight against poverty. After all, it is now crystal clear that no country will work to protect the planet if the price it must pay leads its citizens into a socioeconomic dead-end.
The world’s most advanced economies, which have also been the main CO2 emitters since the Industrial Revolution, must move away from fossil fuels. If we want to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement, this is non-negotiable. Science has set the trajectory: we must move away from coal by 2030, from oil by 2045, and from gas by 2050. While the G7 countries bear the greatest responsibility, China, which is now the second-largest emitter in history, must be fully committed, too.
The threat posed by coal must be addressed first. Today, the 2,000 gigawatts (GW) of installed capacity emit enough CO2 to take us above 1.5°C. While the International Energy Agency recommends withdrawing 92 GW per year, 500 GW of additional capacity is already planned. While it is the G7’s responsibility to move away from coal by 2030 (France will have done so in 2027), emerging economies are now the biggest coal consumers. In these countries, we need to speed up the financing of renewables, as well as nuclear power, which, as a manageable and decarbonized energy source, must play a key role.
We must also put private financing and trade at the service of the Paris Agreement. The cost of investment must be higher for players in the fossil-fuel sector. We need a green interest rate and a brown interest rate. Similarly, we need a climate clause in our trade agreements, because we cannot simultaneously demand that our industries become greener while supporting the liberalization of international trade in polluting products.
For the most vulnerable countries, we must create conditions that enable them to finance their climate-change mitigation and adaptation efforts and access the green technologies that are the new engines of growth. This implies going further than traditional “official development assistance” and doing for vulnerable countries what rich countries did for themselves during the COVID-19
