Gap on climate change unveiled at G7 ministerial meeting in Italy

USA allies in the G7 said on Monday that action to contain devastating climate change was irreversible and could even be accelerated, despite Donald Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Paris accord.

The other G-7 ministers expressed disappointment at President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the Paris Climate Accord, which seeks to limit carbon emissions and reduce the rising global temperatures.

The U.S. said it would not sign up to a pledge by Italy, Canada, Japan, France, Britain and Germany which called the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change “irreversible” and key for the “security and prosperity of our planet”. “We support an interactive evidence-based dialogue drawing on the best available science, including reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the sharing of experience and best practice as well as expertise from United Nations institutions and intergovernmental organizations”, the communique states.

It was an uphill slog.

Leaders of the world’s most industrialized countries had tried to persuade Trump to stick to the agreement in the last G7 major summit held in Taormina, Italy, on May 26-28. In a footnote to the communique, the United States said it wouldn’t join with the other six countries in reaffirming their Paris commitments, but said it was taking action on its own to reduce its carbon footprint.

She also said she told Pruitt that the accord is “not open for renegotiation, although we are in the phase of negotiating the rules”. However, numerous legal arguments Pruitt and other opponents of the Clean Power Plan made could be recycled to justify repealing the carbon dioxide standards administratively, Doniger said.

He reiterated his view that the Paris Agreement would remain “irreversible, non-negotiable, and the only possible tool to fight climate change” for all the United States’ partners in the G7.

Trump’s policies are likely to flatten USA emissions around current levels, about 11.5 percent below 2005 levels, according to a study last month by European researchers who compile a Climate Action Tracker.

While it is important to keep promises, withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord is a unsafe promise that should have never been made.

Scientists warn that failing to contain climate change will have devastating consequences as sea level rise and extreme storms, droughts and heat waves becoming more common, endangering crops and fragile environments with knock-on effects in the form of new conflicts and mass fluxes of people escaping affected areas.

“Let’s be clear: the U.S.is bigger than one administration”, she said.

That means that instead of the G6 against the G1 as in Bologna, it will likely be the G19 against the G1.

Minister McKenna’s G7 counterparts expressed their appreciation for Canada’s leadership and concrete actions to implement the Paris Agreement, including our commitment to put a price on pollution across the country.

Zahra Hirji contributed reporting to this story.