Twilight of the Fossil-Fuel Age
By pledging to phase out oil, gas, and coal by 2100, the G7 countries have put us on the path to a brighter future.
In 1975, leaders from the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan began annual meetings aimed at coordinating economic policy in a world shaped by Cold War rivalry and the rise of the OPEC global oil cartel. The next year the group added Canada. In the four decades since, this Group of Seven, or G7, has become a central forum for aligning the security, economic, and political goals of the wealthiest democracies on earth and integrating the actions needed to achieve them.
And so, when President Obama joined his G7 counterparts this week in pledging to phase out oil, gas, and coal use before the end of this century, it signaled the twilight of the fossil-fuel age — and all the harm, risk, and pollution it has wrought.
In the coming decades, fossil-fuel demand will weaken across developed nations, as the clean energy economy grows stronger. Oil, gas, and coal are now officially recognized as the dirty fossil fuels of the past. Cleaner options will power our future.
The G7 countries account for nearly half the world’s economic output. This week, in the storybook German town of Schloss Elmau, its leaders cast the need to end fossil fuel use as a security, economic, and development goal, as well as an environmental imperative.
It is all that, of course, and more.
From the industrial operation of digging them up to the moment we set them on fire, fossil fuels mean hazard and pollution on a level that our planet — and our people — can no longer sustain. Blowouts put our workers, waters, and wildlife at risk. Explosions threaten our communities and farms. Carbon pollution drives climate change.
Fossil fuels are imposing grave and growing costs on us all. Many, though, are bearing an even greater burden. Low-income populations in G7 countries and across much of the developing world are already paying a heavy price, whether by breathing dirty air, living hard by industrial sacrifice zones, or having their lives battered by widening deserts, rising seas, blistering heat, withering drought, and raging wildfires, floods, storms, and other hallmarks of global climate change.
Climate chaos is an environmental challenge. And yet, as the G7 leaders reminded us, it’s also an economic challenge. It’s a security challenge, a humanitarian challenge, and a challenge to our shared commitment to build just and equitable societies everywhere. That’s the global mission at the core of our drive to put the brakes on climate change.
It starts by doing a better job protecting our environment from the dangers of producing fossil fuels — for instance, we can keep the Atlantic and Arctic waters off the table for oil and gas development. It’s vital that we get that done.
I’m proud to say, though, President Obama has done more to reduce this country’s carbon footprint than any other leader at any other time, anywhere else on the face of the globe. He’s leading the way with standards to clean up our dirty power plants, airplanes, and vehicles. He’s pushed policies to help us build the next generation of energy-efficient cars, workplaces, and homes. He’s helping us get more power from the wind and sun.
It’s all driving American innovation, creating American jobs, and helping to strike a blow against the central environmental challenge of our time. And it’s all part of his commitment to cut U.S. carbon pollution and other greenhouse gas emissions by up to 28 percent by 2025, compared with 2005 levels.
The president knows we Americans can do this. He’s not listening to the voices that want to anchor our future to the dirty fuels of the past. He believes in the power of American promise. And he won’t let anybody turn him around. That’s what presidential leadership is all about, at home and on the world stage.
Our overseas friends are watching. The European Union has pledged to cut its own greenhouse emissions 40 percent by 2030. China has promised to cap its emissions no later than that year, then begin tapering off from there. And Mexico has pledged to peak out not later than 2026 before reducing its emissions as well.
Wealthy and developing countries alike are lining up to fight climate change in preparation for United Nations talks this December in Paris, where leaders of more than 190 countries will hammer out a global accord to cut the carbon pollution from fossil fuels.
We need to act and do it now.
Last year was the hottest ever recorded in more than 130 years of tracking global temperature. The 16 hottest years on record have all occurred since 1997. As such dangers of climate change increase, we must cut the carbon to fulfill our moral obligation to protect future generations. We must replace the use of fossil fuels — not overnight, but over time, and we’ll need concerted, deliberate policies to help us get there. That’s what this week’s G7 pledge is designed to support.
“The G7 feels a special responsibility for shaping our planet’s future,” Obama and his fellow leaders stated this week in the joint declaration that lays out the pledge along with the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by up to 70 percent by 2050.
The G7 is no pie-in-the-sky coffee klatch. The decisions its leaders make, and the actions those decisions lead, help to shape the world we live in and guide the future we create for our children. We elect our leaders to look out over the horizon, anticipate opportunity and challenge and prepare us to make the best of both. It’s twilight for the fossil-fuel age. We’re on the road to a brighter future.
