Can Biden rally world’s polluters to climate fight?
President’s first step is making any US pledges believable
US President Joe Biden is convening a coalition of the willing, the unwilling, the desperate-for-help and the avid-for-money for a global summit today aimed at rallying the world’s worst polluters to move faster against climate change.
The president’s first task: Convincing the world that the politically fractured United States isn’t just willing when it comes to Biden’s new ambitious emissions-cutting pledges, but also able. Success for Biden in the virtual summit of 40 leaders will be making his expected promises — halving coal and petroleum emissions at home and financing climate efforts abroad — believable enough to persuade other powers to make big changes of their own.
For small countries already fighting for their survival, global climate progress noticeably slowed in the four years of President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the effort.
The summit will see Biden, who campaigned on promises for a highemployment, climate-saving technological transformation of the US economy, pledge to halve the amount of coal and petroleum pollution the US is pumping out by 2030, officials said this week. That’s compared to levels in 2005, and nearly double the voluntary target the US set at the landmark 2015 Paris climate accord.
The US is looking to other allies, such as Japan and Canada, to announce their own intensified climate efforts, hoping that will spur China and others to slow building of coalfired power plants and otherwise chill
their smokestacks.
And the world is looking to welloff countries to make clear how they’ll help poorer countries shutter coal plants and retool energy grids, including US$2 billion ($2.8b) the US already promised but has never paid.
This is an urgent but hardly perfect time for the US to try to spur action for multiple reasons.
The world’s top two climate offenders, China and the United States, are feuding over nonclimate issues. Chinese President Xi Jinping waited until yesterday to confirm he would
even take part. India, the world’s third-biggest emitter of fossil fuel fumes, is pressing the US and other wealthier nations to come through on billions of dollars they’ve promised to help poorer nations build alternatives to coal plants and energy-sucking power grids.
“Where is this money? There is no money in sight,” Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar said ahead of the summit this month, after Biden climate envoy John Kerry visited.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose nation by some assessments is the world’s fourth-worst climate polluter, also accepted the US invitation but is fuming over Biden calling him a “killer”, as part of high tensions over Putin’s aggressiveness abroad and US sanctions.
And at home, political rifts created by Trump’s presidency have left the US weaker than it was at the 2015 Paris global accord. Unable to guarantee a different president in 2024 won’t undo Biden’s climate work, the Biden administration has argued market forces will soon make cleaner fuels and energy efficiency too cheap and consumer-friendly to trash.
Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air in Helsinki, says hoping the world will forget about the last four years seems like wishful thinking. “There is too much of an impulse in the US to just wish away Trump’s legacy and the fact that every election is now basically a coin toss between complete climate denial and whatever actions the Democrats can bring to the table.”
China and the US together account for nearly half of the world’s climatewrecking emissions.
Xi’s government continues building new coal-fired power plants, and China’s emissions are still rising. However Myllyvirta said Xi’s recent comments make clear he is serious about cutting emissions.
Amid US and China disputes over territory, trade practices and human rights, however, the two countries’ presummit pronouncements were an island of climate co-operation in a sea of complaints and grievances.
“The international community knows very well who is taking actions, who is playing lip service, who is making contributions and who is seeking one’s own interest,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said before the summit.