Biden supercharges climate crisis efforts
What did the world learn at Joe Biden’s global summit about his vision of the battle to save the world’s climate?
For two days, Biden and his team of climate experts pressed his case that tackling global warming not only can avert an existential threat, but also benefit the United States economy — and the world’s as well.
The virtual summit, based at the White House and featuring more than 40 world leaders, offered fresh details on how the US might hope to supercharge its efforts on climate while leveraging international action to spur new technologies to help save the planet.
Biden opened the conference by announcing a goal to cut up to 52 per cent of US greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 — double the target set by President Barack Obama in the 2015 Paris climate accord.
“This goal is eyebrow-raising, but it has to be,” said Marshall Shepherd, a climate expert at the University of Georgia. “To move the needle on the climate crisis, we need bold actions like this rather than individual or incremental actions only.”
While new targets from the US and others got mostly positive reviews, they still fall a bit short of what some scientists say is necessary to avoid a potentially disastrous 1.5C rise in global temperatures.
Bill Hare, director of Climate Analytics, said his team’s calculations showed the US needs to reduce emissions 57 per cent by 2030 to stay on a 1.5C pathway. He calls the new target “really a major improvement”, but also “not quite enough”.
Biden, known as a cautious, mainstream politician during four decades in public life, as president has shown a willingness to take action on issues from virus relief to immigration.
“In so many areas, he is much bolder than Obama, right out of the gate, and that’s certainly true on climate,” said Nathaniel Keohane, a former Obama White House adviser who now is a senior vice-president of the Environmental Defence Fund.
The climate crisis also has provided an opportunity for the US to work with long-time rivals such as Russia and China. While Biden has often disagreed with Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader now is “talking about how you capture carbon from space”, Biden said. Despite their differences, “two big nations can cooperate to get something done . . . that benefits everybody”.