Scientist Michael Mann argued that the United States must go “far beyond these Paris commitments,” as President Joe Biden rejoined the Paris Climate Agreement on Friday.
“We have to make commitments now if we want to follow the course to avoid a catastrophic three-degree warming Fahrenheit,” Mann, the author of “The New Climate War,” said in a Friday evening interview with The News with “from CNBC Shepard Smith”. “We need to increase our commitments and other countries in the world need to do so.”
The move to return to the Paris climate agreement was a departure from the Trump administration’s climate policy. In 2017, former President Donald Trump announced his intention to withdraw from the deal. In 2019 it formally notified the United Nations and the United States abandoned the Paris Agreement the following year after a waiting period. Mann explained that during this time, the United States “lost four years of opportunity here to meet the biggest challenge we face.”
Joel Rubin, a former deputy secretary of state in the Obama-Biden administration, told The News with Shepard Smith that there is now a higher bar for the U.S. return to the global climate battle.
“The world has shifted from American leadership to climate change and will be skeptical of our commitment to staying committed,” said the national security expert who worked on both climate change policy and programs. of renewable energy in the Clinton and Bush administrations. “This has always been the albatross around the American role in multilateral climate diplomacy: the lack of strong legislative support for it.”
Nationally, the Texas crisis exposed the degree of vulnerability of power grids during extreme weather, which experts warn could worsen due to climate change. National Security Adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall even stressed the danger of climate change during a White House press session on Thursday.
“The extreme weather events we are experiencing this week in the central, southern and now eastern United States show us again that climate change is real and is happening now, and we are not adequately prepared for it,” Sherwood-Randall said.
Mann explained that climate change could be a contributing factor to anxiety in Texas amid freezing temperatures.
“There is some evidence that climate change could lead to an increase in incidents of such events, but there is no doubt that if we collectively look at all the extreme weather phenomena we have seen in recent years, the heat without unprecedented waves and droughts and forest fires and super storms, we can see the fingerprint of human influence on our climate in these devastating events, ”said Mann.
Rubin said Biden’s next task is to pass legislation to create significant changes in reducing the U.S. carbon footprint, so what happened in Texas doesn’t happen more often.
“Doing so would not only be a strong signal to the world that we are talking seriously, but it would ultimately break the Gordian knot that has diminished American credibility on the world stage when it comes to fighting climate change,” he said. Rubin. “This is a necessary political battle. It will be brutal, but the alternative of not having it is much worse.”