Add Biodiversity, Oceans And HFCs To The List Of Global Environmental Protections Trump Is Delaying

BIARRITZ, France—The one-page document agreed upon by the G7 countries here last month was most notable for what it lacked: any of the environmental protections French President Emmanuel Macron had vowed to pursue at the summit.
Chief among those was the Metz Charter on Biodiversity that France was expecting, even as the summit began, all heads of state to sign that weekend.
“It is for the first time, during this G7, that we will sign the Biodiversity Charter,” Macron told Konbini News as the summit began. “It will be signed by all.”
Macron was perhaps confident in the signing because Trump’s EPA Administrator, Andrew Wheeler, had endorsed the charter and bragged about it at a preliminary summit of environmental ministers in May. Furthermore, the Metz Charter is non-binding, and it doesn’t directly impact any of Trump’s pet industries, such as oil and coal. It might have seemed to Macron like an easy sell.
Konbini’s interviewer was less sure.
“Including the United States?” she asked Macron.
“This is the real question. We'll see. I'll put on the pressure!”
But Trump failed to appear at the G7 Summit’s working session on climate, oceans and biodiversity where that pressure would likely have been applied, and after the workshop, Macron changed his aim.
He still insisted all nations would sign the charter, but he announced the signing would take place in late September at the UN Climate Conference in New York.
The Metz Charter is only the first step in Macron’s ambition to develop a global treaty to protect biodiversity at the level of the Paris Agreement on climate change. But biodiversity was not the only environmental initiative on the agenda at Biarritz.
Macron had planned to:
• Enlist more countries in the Carbon Neutrality Coalition of nations that pledge to surpass the Paris Agreement by committing to carbon neutrality by 2050. Macron did not, of course, expect Trump to sign on, and he did announce that India, a non-member invitee, had done so.
• Enlist support for the Coalition of Sustainable Fashion, a French-led group of textile companies that committed to reducing their carbon emissions and the ocean pollution from microfibers.
• Enlist support for a coalition of maritime transport companies seeking to reduce their climate impact and minimize damage to ocean biodiversity.
• Launch a coalition of businesses and heads of state to double the energy efficiency of air conditioners and other cooling appliances and reduce the particularly potent emissions of hydrofluorocarbon refrigerants.
The French Presidency listed all of these initiatives as “Planned G7 Deliverables” and “Main Focuses of the Biarritz Summit,” but none were mentioned in the document released as the summit adjourned.