Biden closes climate summit with unity appeal
WASHINGTON — World leaders joined President Joe Biden on Friday to close his virtual climate summit with stories of their own national drives to break free of climate-wrecking fossil fuels — Kenyans leapfrogging from kerosene stoves to geothermal power and Israeli startups scrambling to improve battery storage.
“We’re gonna do this together,” Biden exhorted, speaking live to a Zoom-style screen of leaders of national governments, unions and business executives around the world.
Biden’s closing message echoed the sentiments of Kenyan President Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta, who told the summit: “We cannot win this fight against climate change unless we go globally to fight it together.”
The second and final day of Biden’s summit of 40 world leaders made the case for massive investment now — in the U.S. and around the world — for prosperous as well as cleaner economies in the long run.
Compared with the United States and other wealthy but carbon-dependent nations, Kenya stands out as a poorer nation closing the technology gap despite limited financial resources. It has moved in decades from dirty-burning coal, kerosene and wood fires to become a leading user and producer of geothermal energy, wind and solar power, all aided by mobilephone banking.
The summit’s opening Thursday saw a half-dozen nations, including the United States, pledge specific, significant new efforts to cut emissions. Other summit speakers, including Chinese President Xi Jinping, whose country is the world’s top climate polluter, held out the possibility of deepening their commitments, in China’s case by easing back on building of coal-fired plants.
Biden’s own pledge, nearly doubling the U.S. target for cutting emissions from coal and petroleum this decade, depends on his keeping political support from voters and securing more than $2 trillion for a nationwide infrastructure overhaul.
“The commitments we’ve made must become real,” Biden said Friday, speaking to the home audience as much as the international one. He wondered aloud if there was “anything else you can think of that could create as many good jobs going into the 21st century.”
The coronavirus pandemic forced the summit into its virtual format, with a TV talk show-style set created in the White House East Room.
It was all in service of an argument officials say will make or break Biden’s climate vision: Pouring trillions into clean-energy technology, research and infrastructure will speed a competitive U.S. economy into the future, create jobs and save the planet.
While technological development and wider use has helped make wind and solar power strongly competitive against coal and natural gas in the U.S., Biden said investment also would bring forward thriving, clean-energy fields “in things we haven’t even thought of so far.”
Republicans are sticking to the arguments that then-president Donald Trump made in pulling the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris climate accord. They point to China as the world’s worst climate polluter — the U.S. is No. 2 — and say any transition to clean energy hurts American oil, natural gas and coal workers.