The G7 Summit in Germany is both being hailed as a huge breakthrough and condemned as a giant letdown by global-warming acolytes — in the run-up to the UN’s global Climate Summits in New York and Paris later this year.
The call by the leaders of the Group of Seven (G7) nations to slash global use of carbon-based fuels has elicited widely mixed reactions from the global-warming activist choir, ranging from near euphoric claims that this is a historic watershed moment to disappointed (and even harshly critical) charges that G7 leaders squandered a chance to save the planet.
Hosted by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the annual G7 confab took place June 7-8 in a Bavarian castle called Schloss Elmau. In addition to leaders of the G7 nations (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom, United States) and the European Union, the gathering also included Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi, Tunisian President Mohamed Beji Caid Essebsi, and newly installed Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari. In addition to proposing policies regarding the Russia-Ukraine crisis, the Greek debt crisis, regional-global trade pacts, and urgent issues in the Middle East, the leaders pledged their commitment to “a decarbonisation of the global economy over the course of this century.”
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A Reuters story for June 8 carried the headline: “G7 leaders bid ‘Auf Widersehen’ to carbon fuels,” and reported: “The Group of Seven’s energy pledge capped a successful summit for host Angela Merkel, who revived her credentials as a ‘climate chancellor’ and strengthened Germany’s friendship with the United States at the meeting in a Bavarian resort.” Of course, what virtually all of the stories praising Merkel failed to mention is that her energy/climate program for Germany has been a national disaster, both for the economy and the environment (see articles linked below).
“Elmau delivered,” exulted Martin Kaiser, head of international climate politics for Greenpeace. “At the close of the G7 discussion today in Elmau, the vision of a 100% renewable energy future is starting to take shape while spelling out the end of coal,” he continued. “The decisions made by the G7 today indicated an acknowledgement that there needs to be a phase-out of climate-killing coal and oil by 2050 at the latest. Merkel and Obama succeeded in not allowing Canada and Japan to continue blocking progress towards tackling climate change.”
Greenpeace U.S. Energy Campaign Director Kelly Mitchell added: “Leaders at the G7 meeting have put forward a powerful call to move the global economy away from fossil fuels and toward a renewable energy future. Heading into the Paris climate meeting this year, it’s a significant step toward securing a commitment to 100% renewable energy by 2050.” Greenpeace was among the many radical Big Green groups protesting outside the G7 conference.
“This does push countries, and certainly a country like Canada or Japan. I think they are not currently on a decarbonisation pathway so this definitely does pull them more into that pathway,” said Jennifer Morgan, director of the global climate program at the World Resources Institute. “The fact that you’ve got a group who have different positions in the negotiations to come together on some of these issues is significant and somewhat surprising,” she noted.
“Angela Merkel took the G7 by the scruff of the neck — and with the broad support from the US and the other European leaders, saw off the apparently entrenched opposition of Japan and Canada to ambitious language on climate change,” effused Greenpeace advisor Ruth Davis. “To investors and businesses it says ‘change is coming — it’s transformational and its irreversible — get ready.’”
But other far-left groups in the “environmental” and “human rights/economic justice” orbits charged that the G7 response to anthropogenic (manmade) global warming, or AGW, is “lukewarm” and woefully inadequate to deal with the supposed dangers that burning hydrocarbons is causing. “If the G7 really want to implement their decisions, they must take concrete measures — such as promptly initiating a phase-out of harmful coal,” said Oxfam climate analyst Jan Kowalzig, adding, “This lukewarm summit result will only make the fight harder, if not impossible.”
On June 6, the eve of the summit, Oxfam issued its briefing paper entitled Let Them Eat Coal: Why the G7 must stop burning coal to tackle climate change and fight hunger, which utilizes computer modeling to make extravagant claims about the alleged negative impact that burning coal causes to the global environment.
“Coal is the single biggest driver of catastrophic climate change — responsible for one-third of all CO2 emissions since the industrial revolution,” the Oxfam report claims. “Moving beyond it is the first acid test of whether we will win the fight against runaway climate change. Each coal power station can be seen as a weapon of climate destruction — fuelling ruinous weather patterns, devastating harvests, driving food price rises and ultimately leaving more people facing hunger…. Without urgent action, climate change could put back the fight against hunger by several decades.”
Oxfam and allied organizations leading the “decarbonization” campaign insist that coal, oil, and natural gas must be left in the ground to prevent a global-warming Armageddon. As we have reported here previously, the global campaign against all hydrocarbon fuels, and coal in particular, proposes an energy recipe that, if adopted, would result in massive human suffering and death worldwide. The anti-coal/oil/gas jihad would also, ironically, end up causing great harm to the global natural environment, as billions of people would be forced to strip forests of firewood for cooking and warmth.
The “G7 Leaders’ Declaration” issued June 8, at Schloss Elmau, states, regarding global warming:
Urgent and concrete action is needed to address climate change, as set out in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report. We affirm our strong determination to adopt at the Climate Change Conference in December in Paris this year (COP21) a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) applicable to all parties that is ambitious, robust, inclusive and reflects evolving national circumstances.
“The agreement should enhance transparency and accountability including through binding rules at its core to track progress towards achieving targets, which should promote increased ambition over time,” the declaration continues. “This should enable all countries to follow a low-carbon and resilient development pathway in line with the global goal to hold the increase in global average temperature below 2 °C.”
Citing the UN’s discredited Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Leaders’ Declaration commits to both global and national “low carbon strategies.” It states: “Mindful of this goal and considering the latest IPCC results, we emphasize that deep cuts in global greenhouse gas emissions are required with a decarbonisation of the global economy over the course of this century. Accordingly, as a common vision for a global goal of greenhouse gas emissions reductions we support sharing with all parties to the UNFCCC the upper end of the latest IPCC recommendation of 40 to 70 % reductions by 2050 compared to 2010 recognizing that this challenge can only be met by a global response. We commit to doing our part to achieve a low-carbon global economy in the long-term including developing and deploying innovative technologies striving for a transformation of the energy sectors by 2050 and invite all countries to join us in this endeavor. To this end we also commit to develop long term national low-carbon strategies.”
The G7 focus on global warming is the latest major political event to promote one of the biggest scientific scams in human history, but many more similar ham-fisted efforts can be expected over the coming months leading up to the UN’s Climate Summit this December in Paris. As The New American has reported previously, even many of the top global-warming alarmist groups and individuals — including the UN’s IPCC — have recently admitted that, contrary to the incessant media barrage, there has been no measurable global warming for over 18-and-a-half years (see here and here.)
It is becoming increasingly clear to more and more people that the push for decarbonization and the alarmists’ ludicrous obsession over CO2 — which is the natural “gas of life,” not a pollutant and not a driver of global temperatures — is all about empowering the United Nations and centralizing political and economic control, not anything to do with averting a (non-existent) impending climate apocalypse. As the UN’s top climate czar Christianna Figuerres has boasted, the real objective of the Global Climate Summit in Paris is “Complete Transformation of the World.”
Related articles:
UN Plan for 2015 Climate Summit Would Shackle Planet With Energy Restrictions
Global Conning: Temperature Data Cooked in “Biggest Science Scandal Ever”
Enforced Energy Poverty: Coal, Oil, Gas Must Stay in Ground Say Alarmists
Climate Fanatics Force Poor to “Choose Between Heating or Eating”
UN Plan for 2015 Climate Summit Would Shackle Planet With Energy Restrictions
“Green” Meltdown: Solar Companies Are Germany’s Biggest “Capital Destroyers”
Germany Cuts Subsidies to Floundering Solar Industry
Welcome to the Renewable Energy Future: A Lesson From Germany
