Australia joins G7-backed 'climate club' and promises to drive down greenhouse gas emissions

BERLIN -- Australia is joining the “climate club” backed by the Group of Seven major economies to take more ambitious action in tackling global warming, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Monday.

The club was first proposed by Nobel Prize winner William Nordhaus as a way of getting countries to voluntarily set high targets for curbing climate change and then require trading partners to meet those same standards. Such moves are opposed by major emerging economies like China, the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gas.

“We’re very pleased to join the climate club because we are ambitious and we also see that this isn’t just the right thing to do by the environment, but this is also the right thing to do by jobs and by our economy,” Albanese said at a news conference in Berlin after meeting German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who made the idea a key pillar of his G7 presidency last year.

"One thing we can do is to cooperate and learn off each other, because you can’t address climate change as just a national issue. It has to be by definition, a global response,” Albanese said.

Albanese's government committed last year to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 43% by the end of the decade — almost double the previous target. In March, Parliament passed a law requiring Australia's biggest greenhouse gas polluters reduce their emissions or pay for carbon credits.

Other countries that have joined the climate club include Argentina, Chile, Denmark, Indonesia, Colombia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Singapore and Uruguay.