The United States has returned to the Paris climate accord
WASHINGTON — World leaders welcomed the United States’ official return to the Paris climate accord Friday, but politically trickier measures lie ahead for President Joe Biden, including placing a tough national goal in forthcoming months for cutting harmful fossil fuel emissions.
And even as Biden noted the nation’s first day back from the climate pact, the world’s dangerous heating was merely one of a long list of pressing problems he raised into a video address to European leaders on Friday, a month in his government. Before bringing weather difficulties, he touched the international outbreak, sputtering national economies and tense relations with China, among other matters that threaten to impede and delay tackling the country’s standing as the world’s best carbon polluter following China.
Despite all the other challenges,” Biden said, speaking into the Munich security conference,”we can no longer wait or do the bare minimum to address climate change. This is a global existential crisis, and all us will suffer if we fail.”
Biden signed an executive order on his first day in office reversing the pullout ordered by President Donald Trump. Trump said shortly after he took office he would initiate the process of yanking the U.S. from the Paris accord, but it did not take effect till Nov. 4, 2020, because of provisions in the arrangement.
Officially, the United States was only from the worldwide international climate pact for 107 days. It was part of Trump’s withdrawal from global allegiances in general along with his oft-stated but false opinion that global warming was a laughably confused take by the world’s scientists.
More widely, Trump reversed Obama-era initiatives to rein in oil, coal and gas emissions and opened new national lands and oceans to mining and drilling. Biden is working to overturn those steps and also has vowed a $2 trillion remake of U.S. power grids, transportation systems and other infrastructure to sharply cut fossil fuel pollution.
While Friday’s yield is greatly symbolic, world leaders say they expect America to establish its seriousness to the origin. They are particularly excited for the United States to announce its new national 2030 target for cutting fossil fuel emissions, which scientists agree are altering the Earth’s climate and worsening the extremes of drought, hurricanes, flooding and other natural disasters.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Thursday the official reentry”is itself very important,” as is Biden’s statement the U.S. will go back to supplying climate aid to poorer nations, as promised in 2009.
“It’s not about how many times. It is the political symbolism the largest economy won’t observe the chance of addressing climate change” She had been one of the leading forces in hammering out the mostly voluntary 2015 agreement where states set their own aims to reduce greenhouse gases.
One fear was that other nations would follow America in abandoning the climate struggle, but none did, Figueres explained. She stated the real issue has been four years of climate inaction from the Trump government. American cities, states and businesses still functioned to reduce heat-trapping carbon dioxide but without the participation of the federal government.
“We’ve lost too long,” Figueres explained.
Inger Andersen, the environment program director in the United Nations, said America must prove its leadership to the rest of the world, but she stated she has no doubt it will when it submits its required emissions cutting goals.
“We hope they’ll translate into a very significant reduction of emissions, and they will be an example for other countries to follow,” Guterres said.
The Biden government is working now on a target that balances meaningful cuts in emissions with political and financial realities. Settling on a U.S. emissions goal by April, when Biden plans to host world leaders for an Earth Day summit, could assist the administration prod other countries for ambitious emissions cuts too. That spring meeting should see countries start”to place the down payments on the desk,” John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, said Friday.
Republican leaders are fighting with it.
The Biden administration will place unworkable aims for the United States while China and Russia can continue with business as normal.”
University of Maryland environment professor Nate Hultman, who worked on the Obama administration’s official Paris goal, said he expects a 2030 goal of cutting carbon dioxide emissions between 40 percent and 50% from the 2005 baseline amounts.
A longtime international goal, included in the Paris accord with an even more stringent target, is to keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times.
The United States’ return to the Paris accord and an ambitious target for emissions cuts will make restricting heating”to well below 2 degrees — not just to two degrees but under 2 degrees — a lot more likely,” said climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, electricity and climate director to the Breakthrough Institute.
