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Promising Steps Forward at the G7’s Toronto Energy and Environment Ministers’ Meeting

By John Kirton, G7 Research Group, October 31, 2025

The G7’s energy and environment ministers’ meeting (EEMM), held in Toronto, Canada, on October 30–31, 2025, was poised midway through its second morning to take several strong steps forward on the critical issues it focused on for the G7 and the world as a whole.

Energy

The first was helping to win Russia’s war against Ukraine by moving toward replacing Europe’s imports from Russia, which were financing President Vladimir Putin’s war machine, with US and Canadian gas and oil. The highly engaged and articulate US secretary of energy Chris Wright emphasized the US determination to win the war, in this and other ways. The war was front and centre throughout the meeting as Svitlana Grynchuk, Ukraine’s minister of environmental protection and natural resources, was participating as a guest in all the sessions over the two days. And Canada’s minister of foreign affairs Anita Anand joined Tim Hodgson, Minister of Natural Resources, and Julie Dabrusin, Minister of the Environment and Climate Change, to reinforce the G7’s determination to win the war through stronger action in several ways. That action included announcing new financing for a joint venture between a Canadian firm and a Ukrainian partner to develop critical minerals. The G7 EEMM was on track to mobilize much more money to implement its agreements than their leaders had at their Kananaskis Summit in June.

The second step was an advance on the G7’s Critical Minerals Action Plan and Production Alliance, which would be reinforced, rather than reduced by the October 29 announcement from US president Donald Trump and Chinese president Xi Jinping that China would suspend the new export restrictions on rare earths for a year. Wright made it clear that neither the US nor the G7 could count on the Chinese to sell them the rare earths needed to fuel their defence, energy systems and economies as a whole. Rather, the G7 must come together, and with other partners, to build an alternative that it controlled. And unlike liquefied natural gas and oil supplies to Europe, where the US alone could supply all that Europe now got from Russia, he recognised that the US needed its G7 partners in the rare earths and critical minerals field.

Environment

On the environmental agenda, several advances were also made, because the US recognized it needed the help of its G7 partners, to give Americans at home the clean air and clean water they needed. Lee Zeldin, Administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency, spoke of how the wildfires – addressed by the G7 leaders for the first time in their KananaskisWildfire Charter – were a shared Canada-US concern, as they had erupted in Los Angeles as well as Canada, and their smoke crossed the border with its PM2.5 particles that harmed people’s health.

On freshwater, Zeldin also noted approvingly the work of the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation among the US, Canada and G7 guest Mexico, whose annual ministerial council meeting would be held in Canada next year.

On oceans, he noted that he previously represented the US Congressional District covering Long Island in New York State, which gave him first-hand familiarity with the environmental issues the oceans faced.

Shortcomings

Still, there were some shortcomings.

In the ministers’ outcome documents there were likely to be few, if any, explicit references to climate change or agreements to act against it. The Kananaskis Summit documents had had none.

And there were no signs that when the US assumes the G7 presidency for 2027, it would include a meeting of energy or environment ministers. Since the G7 started meeting in 1975, the US has done so only once in its year as host – at Miami for environment ministers in 1997 when Bill Clinton was president.

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	Please send comments to: g7@utoronto.ca This page was last updated October 31, 2025.