Biden doubles US emissions cut target
WASHINGTON: President Joe Biden on Thursday doubled US ambitions on slashing greenhouse gas emissions, leading Japan and Canada at a summit in making new commitments that bring the world closer to limiting the worst climate change.
Putting the US back at the forefront on climate, Biden told a virtual Earth Day summit that the world’s largest economy will cut emissions blamed for climate change by 50 to 52 per cent by 2030 compared with 2005 levels.
“The cost of inaction keeps mounting. The United States isn’t waiting,” Biden told a two-day summit of 40 leaders including the presidents of rivals China and Russia and Pope Francis.
“We have to step up,” Biden said. “We have to take action — all of us.”
Biden’s early and aggressive environmental push marks a drastic shift from his predecessor Donald Trump — but quickly raised questions on whether the US can keep promises if another climate-skeptic president is elected in the future.
John Kerry, the former secretary of state who has become Biden’s globe-trotting climate envoy, insisted that change will be permanent due to market forces no matter what happens in US elections.
“No politician — no matter how demagogic or how potent or capable they are — is going to be able to change what that market is doing because it will have moved, it will have had four years of entrenchment,” Kerry told reporters.
With Thursday’s pledges, Kerry said more than half the world’s economy has committed to action to keep the planet’s temperature within 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times, the aspiration set in the Paris Agreement to avoid the most severe effects of climate change.
Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, who discussed climate last week when he was Biden’s first foreign guest, significantly raised the goals
The cost of inaction keeps mounting. The United States isn’t waiting. We have to step up. We have to take action — all of us. Joe Biden
of the world’s second largest developed economy to cutting emissions by 46 per cent in 2030 compared with 2013.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, another early ally of Biden, boosted ambitions of his energy-exporting country to reductions of 40-45 per cent below 2005 levels, compared with an earlier target of 30 per cent.
“We must take action now. Because there’s no vaccine against a polluted planet,” Trudeau said.
United Nations (UN) SecretaryGeneral Antonio Guterres hailed the pledges as a sign that ‘the tide is turning for climate action’ but urged immediate follow-up.
The European Union this week confirmed its own ambitious goals and former bloc member Britain on the eve of Biden’s summit released the most farreaching targets of any major economy with 78 per cent cuts from 1990 levels by 2035.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson called Biden’s pledge ‘a game-changer’.
Britain in November will host a UN conference in Glasgow that aims to upgrade the Paris Agreement.
Kerry said the next six months will be ‘absolutely criticial’, calling Glasgow “our last best hope to be able to coalesce the world in the right direction.”
Under the 2015 Paris accord, former president Barack Obama said the US would cut emissions by 26 to 28 per cent by 2025
— a goal that Biden, his vice president, has now dramatically scaled up.
But Greta Thunburg, the emblematic 18-year-old climate champion, accused politicians of still not understanding the scale of the climate crisis as she pointed to continued subsidies for fossil fuels.
“How long do you honestly believe people in power like you will get away with it?” she told an Earth Day hearing in the US Congress by videolink.
Both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke of commitments to fighting climate change, agreeing to participate despite high tensions with Biden’s three-month-old administration.
Xi reiterated his pledge last year that China — by far the world’s largest emitter — would go carbon neutral by 2060.
“China has committed to move from carbon peak to carbon neutrality in a much shorter time span than what might take many developed countries, and that requires extraordinarily hard efforts from China,” Xi said.
He said China would ‘strictly control’ coal-powered plants.
But environmentalists have voiced alarm at China’s slow pace of retiring coal, which is the dirtiest form of energy but politically sensitive due to mining jobs.
President Moon Jae-in announced that South Korea would no longer fund coalpowered plants overseas after backing, along with Japan and China, billions of dollars in dirty projects in Asia.
A UN report late last year said that the world was on course for warming of three degrees Celsius — a level at which the planet is forecast to see many glaciers and ice caps melt, low-lying areas submerged and increasingly severe droughts, floods and disasters that could trigger famine and mass migration.