Biden, world leaders try to figure next steps on climate
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden tried on Friday to hammer out the world’s next steps against rapidly worsening climate change with a small group of other global leaders and announced a new U.S.European pledge to cut climate-wrecking methane leaks.
Ever-grimmer findings from scientists this year that the world is nearing the point where the level of climate damage from burning oil, gas and coal becomes catastrophic and irreversible “represent a code red for humanity,” Biden said at the session’s outset.
Underscoring the concern, a new study from the United Nations climate agency released Friday said that even if all countries meet the emissions promises that they have made to address climate change, the global average temperature is poised to rise 2.7 degrees Celsius, or 4.8 degrees Fahrenheit, by the end of the century, a level considered “catastrophic,” The New York Times reported.
“We have to act and we have to act now,” Biden said, speaking on a specially erected White House set that showed a wall of other global leaders listening on screens.
Biden, in the public opening of the otherwise private talks, hailed a new U.S. agreement with the European Union aiming at cutting the two entities’ emissions of methane 30% by the end of this decade. Methane, the main component of natural gas, is one of the most potent agents of climate damage, gushing up by the ton from countless uncapped oil and gas rigs, leaky natural gas pipelines and other oil and gas facilities.
Biden evoked the “damage and destruction” he had seen in the United States, massive flooding in Europe and other global damage from the warming climate. He cited his trips earlier this month to California, where firefighters are battling larger, fiercer and deadlier wildfires almost year-round as temperatures rise and drought worsens, and to the northeastern U.S. and Gulf Coast, where Hurricane
Ida and its flooding killed scores, as natural disasters increase in number and severity under climate change.
The White House billed Friday’s meeting as a chance for some of the world leaders to strategize how to achieve big, fast cuts in climate-wrecking petroleum and coal emissions. The administration also is trying to reestablish the United States’ Major Economies Forum — a climate group set up by former President Barack Obama and revived by Biden — as a significant forum for international climate negotiations.
Friday’s meeting followed a much bigger andsplashiervirtualWhite House climate summit in April that saw scores of heads of governments making sweeping speeches about the need to act against climate change.
China, India and Russia, with the United States, are the nations that emit the most climate-damaging gases from the production and burning of oil, natural gas and coal.
There was no word on their leaders’ taking part.