Biden plans talks on climate, invites Russians, Chinese
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden is including rivals Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China among the invitees to the first big climate talks of his administration, an event the U.S. hopes will help shape, speed up and deepen global efforts to cut climate-wrecking fossil fuel pollution, administration officials said.
The president is seeking to revive a U.S.-convened forum of the world’s major economies on climate that George W. Bush and Barack Obama used and Donald Trump let languish. Leaders of some of the world’s top climate-change sufferers, do-gooders and backsliders round out some of the rest of the 40 invitations delivered Friday. The talks will be held virtually April 22 and 23.
Hosting the summit will fulfill a campaign pledge and executive order by Biden, and the administration is timing the event with its own coming announcement of what’s a much tougher U.S. target for revamping the U.S. economy to sharply cut emissions from coal, natural gas and oil.
The session will test Biden’s pledge to make climate change a priority among competing political, economic, policy and pandemic problems. It also will pose a very public test of whether U.S. leaders, and Biden, in particular, can still drive global decision-making after the Trump administration withdrew globally and shook up longstanding alliances.
The Biden administration intentionally looked beyond its international partners for the talks, an administration official said.
“It’s a list of the key players, and it’s about having some of the tough conversations and the important conversations,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss U.S. plans for the event. “Given how important … this issue is to the entire world, we have to be willing to talk about it, and we have to be willing to talk about it at the high levels.”
Trump pulled the United States out of the 2015 U.N. Paris climate accords as one of his first actions. That makes next month’s summit the first major international climate discussions by a U.S. leader in more than four years, although leaders in Europe and elsewhere have kept up talks.
U.S. officials and some others give the Obama administration’s major-economies climate discussions some of the credit for laying the groundwork for the Paris accord. The United States and nearly 200 other governments at those talks each set targets for cutting their fossil-fuel emissions, and pledged to monitor and report their emissions. Another Biden administration official said the U.S. is still deciding how far the administration will go in setting a more ambitious U.S. emissions target.
The Biden administration hopes the stage provided by next month’s Earth Day climate summit — planned to be all virtual because of covid-19 and all publicly viewable on livestream, including breakout conversations — will encourage other international leaders to use it as a platform to announce their own countries’ tougher emission targets or other commitments, ahead of November’s U.N. global climate talks in Glasgow.
Biden’s invitation list consists of leaders of the world’s biggest economies and European blocs.
That includes two countries — Russia and China — that Biden and his diplomats are clashing with over election interference, cyberattacks, human rights violations and other issues.
It’s not clear how those two countries, in particular, will respond to the U.S. invitations, or whether they are willing to cooperate with the U.S. on cutting emissions while sparring on other topics. China is the world’s top emitter of climate-damaging pollution. The U.S. is No. 2. Russia is No. 4.