G20: No visible strong signal on climate protection
Economic powers
Rome (AP) – The carried out to give a strong signal from the G20 summit before the world climate meeting in Glasgow threatens to fail. The group of major economic powers (G20) cannot reveal concrete goals for climate protection at its summit in Rome.
This emerges from a recent draft of the final communiqué that the German Press Agency had before. The original intention to set targets and concrete commitments to combat dangerous geothermal warming from earlier versions have been deleted.
Not even “easy action” anymore
The two-day summit of heads of state and government ends this Sunday in the Italian capital, while the two-week climate meeting (COP26) begins in Scotland. Consulted in Glasgow at the invitation of the United Nations. 25,000 people, including thousands of journalists and climate protection activists, were expected.
In the draft for the final communiqué of the G20 summit, there was no longer even an agreement on “immediate action”, as it had been called in an earlier draft. There was also no progress towards the goal of carbon dioxide neutrality. The target date originally set for 2050 is now more generally referred to as “the middle of the century”. Obviously, this was also done out of consideration for China. The largest producer of carbon dioxide had previously only committed to this until 2060.
G20: 80 percent of global greenhouse gases
The group of economic powers plays an important role because it is responsible for around 80 percent of global greenhouse gases. The G20’s positions on climate protection differed widely, but there was extensive agreement in Rome on plans for a planned expansion of the vaccination rate against the coronavirus worldwide, as the draft further shows.
The G20 supports the goals of the World Health Organization (WHO) to want to vaccinate at least 40 percent of “the population in all countries” by the end of the year. By the middle of next year it should be 70 percent. The host, Italy’s Prime Minister Mario Draghi, criticized the great differences in vaccination progress. While in rich countries around 70 percent of the population are vaccinated at least once, the death rate in the poorest countries falls to three percent. These differences are “morally unacceptable”.
Merkel, Scholz and also Biden meet Erdogan
The only executive Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) will meet Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for the second time within just two weeks on Sunday on the sidelines of the summit – but this time her Finance Minister and likely successor Olaf Scholz (SPD) will be there. The conversation should mainly focus on the diplomatic crisis that has just been averted around the entrepreneur and human rights activist Osman Kavala, who has been imprisoned for four years.
Erdogan had accused the ambassadors of Germany, the USA and eight other Western countries meddling and threatened them with expulsion. A declaration by individual ambassadors, which Erdogan saw as giving in, prevented the scandal.
US President Joe Biden also wanted to meet Erdogan on Sunday, like a senior White House official. It will be about the situation in the crisis countries Libya and Syria, but also about the controversial purchase of the Russian missile defense system S-400 by Turkey. The USA had excluded the NATO partner due to a brief armaments project, the development of the F-35 fighter aircraft.
Biden urges implementation of the Nord Stream 2 agreement
Biden had already met Merkel and Scholz on Saturday, the first day of the summit. The US President emphasized the importance of the German-American agreement on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. In it, Germany undertakes to prevent Russia from politically instrumentalizing natural gas exports – especially against Ukraine. Should a traffic light alliance between the SPD, the Greens and the FDP come about, the positions of the coalition partners on Nord Stream 2 would diverge very widely. The Greens are strictly against the project, while Scholz’s SPD is more in favor of it.
Nord Stream 2 was a main point of contention in German-American relations, especially in the era of US President Donald Trump. Another transatlantic dispute was settled in Rome. The US united with the EU on the provisional settlement of their longstanding dispute over American special tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. Both sides declared that on Saturday evening on the sidelines of the summit meeting.
According to US information, the agreement in principle stipulates that the EU states may in future import certain quantities of the materials into the USA duty-free. In addition, both parties are suspending pending proceedings in the matter before the bodies of the World Trade Organization (WTO).
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 211030-99-802768 / 3