Leaders vow to cut methane, protect forests at UN summit; bolder climate action must wait
GLASGOW, Scotland — With global leaders unable to reach consensus on how to quickly curb rising temperatures, President
Joe Biden sought other avenues of progress on his last day at the U.N. climate summit — forging narrower agreements to cut methane emissions and save the world’s forests.
The patchwork of announcements generated a flurry of positive headlines Tuesday, despite environmental advocates’ doubts that the convention will provide the momentum necessary to halt climate change before its deadly effects ravage more parts of the globe.
During a news conference held shortly before he left the summit, Biden hailed the progress he and other leaders had made but also acknowledged “we’ve got a lot more to do.”
“There’s a reason for people to be worried,” the president said. “I’m worried if we don’t continue to move forward and make the kind of progress we’re now making, we throw into jeopardy the prospect that we’re going to be able to keep the temperature from rising above 1.5 degree Celsius.”
World leaders announced Tuesday that nearly 100 countries had joined a global pledge to limit emissions of methane, a planetwarming gas more potent as a polluter than carbon dioxide.
They signed a pact to prevent further deforestation by 2030 — a promise that Britain hailed as the summit’s first major achievement, but that experts said would be difficult to accomplish.
And leaders hinted that wealthy countries might be closer to fulfilling their promise of providing $100 billion a year in aid to help poor countries adapt to climate change and transition to cleaner sources of energy.
The summit will continue for another 10 days but without most countries’ top representatives.
Before the summit began, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson described the fight against climate change as a soccer game in which humanity was losing 5-1. On Tuesday, he said humanity has scored a goal or two since then, and, “I think we’re going to be able to take this thing to extra time.”
“There’s no doubt that some progress has been made,” he said during a news conference.
But with the leaders of China and Russia, two of the top polluting countries, absent from the conference and refusing to accelerate their plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the stated goal of preventing average temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius remained only a symbolic gesture. Beyond that threshold, scientists say heat waves will become deadlier, wildfires more frequent and floods more damaging. Some parts of the world, including much of the Arctic, have already surpassed
1.5 degrees, with catastrophic consequences.
Asked about Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s absence, Biden called their decision not to attend the summit “a big mistake.”
“We showed up. And by showing up, we’ve had a profound impact,” the president said. “They’ve lost the ability to influence people around the world and people here at COP.”
He later added: “How do you do that and claim to be able to have any leadership now?”
Other countries that the U.S. had hoped to pressure into accelerating their transitions away from fossil fuels offered only distant promises.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that his country would become carbon neutral by 2070, missing by about 20 years the summit’s goal of zeroing out carbon emissions by midcentury. Modi’s country is the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.