US returns to Paris climate accord
The United States officially returned to the Paris global climate accord Friday, and President Joe Biden and other U.S. leaders declared the nation could not afford to sideline the growing climate crisis again.
“We can no longer delay or do the bare minimum to address climate change. This is a global existential crisis, and all of us will suffer if we fail,” Biden told European leaders at a Munich security conference by video Friday.
“We’re back,” Biden said, renewing assurances the U.S. was back in global initiatives at large.
Former President Donald Trump declared in 2017 that the U.S. would pull out of the pact, but it did not officially occur until Nov. 4, according to the pact’s bylaws. The decision was part of Trump’s withdrawal from global allegiances in general and his often-stated view that man-made global warming was a mistaken take by scientists.
The U.S. return to the Paris agreement became official Friday, almost a month after Biden told the United Nations that America wants back in. “A cry for survival comes from the planet itself,” Biden said in his inaugural address. “A cry that can’t be any more desperate or any more clear now.”
Although Friday’s return is heavily symbolic, world leaders said they expect America to prove its seriousness after four years of being pretty much absent. They are especially anticipating an announcement from the U.S. in coming months on its goal for cutting damaging emissions from burning coal and petroleum by 2030.
The Biden administration said it will settle on a tougher new target for the U.S. emissions cuts by the time Biden hosts a planned Earth Day global summit for world leaders on April 22.
Biden signed an executive order on his first day in office reversing the pullout ordered by Trump.
United Nations Secretary-general Antonio Guterres said Thursday that the official American reentry “is itself very important,” as is Biden’s announcement that the U.S. will return to providing climate aid to poorer nations, as promised in 2009.
“It’s the political message that’s being sent,” said Christiana Figueres, the former United Nations climate chief. She was one of the leading forces in hammering out the 2015 mostly voluntary agreement in which nations set goals to reduce greenhouse gases.
One fear was that other nations would follow America in abandoning the fight, but none did, Figueres said. She said the real issue was four years of climate inaction by the Trump administration. American cities, states and businesses still worked to reduce heat-trapping carbon dioxide but without the federal government.
“From a political symbolism perspective, whether it’s 100 days or four years, it’s basically the same thing,” Figueres said.
Already more than 120 nations, including No. 1 emitter China, have promised to have net zero carbon emissions around midcentury.
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