At the White House summit on Thursday and Friday, Biden will pledge the United States to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 50% -52% below 2005 emissions levels by 2030 .
Officials said Biden and his team reached the final number at a meeting at the White House on Wednesday morning.
When then-President Barack Obama first joined the Paris climate deal in 2015, he pledged to reduce emissions from 26% to 28% by 2025, making the new 50% -52 % reduce an important jump. A second official said the higher target would give the US “significant leverage” to convince other countries to increase their ambitions ahead of a climate summit in Glasgow later this year.
What the president will not reveal, at least for now, is a specific roadmap for how the United States will achieve its goals, which are described as “the whole economy.” Officials described “multiple pathways” for the U.S. to reach the target and said the president’s climate working group would publish sector-by-sector recommendations later this year to achieve the necessary cuts.
“Achieving this goal is something we can do in several ways,” a senior administration official said a day before the announcement.
“In the coming months, you will continue to see from the administration an approach to drive the necessary actions that open up the job opportunities presented by the fight against the climate crisis,” the senior government official said.
Several members of Biden’s cabinet will play a role in the summit, including conducting sessions, speaking in sessions and discussing how their role or department or agency belongs to issues related to the climate crisis, he said in early this week an independent administration official.
The summit will focus on mobilizing public and private sector funding to achieve zero net emissions and “build a resilient future,” according to the official. The United States plans to discuss investing in innovation, which the administration believes is critical to creating transformative technologies to reduce emissions while creating new economic opportunities.
Other countries are expected to follow the US example with additional announcements of new targets to deal with the crisis, the administration official said.
“There is a significant signal that we expect action to be taken at this meeting. We are looking for people to make announcements, increase their ambition and indicate the next steps they intend to take to help solve the climate problem,” the official said. .
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping are two notable leaders who have confirmed their attendance at the summit, highlighting the wide range of leaders attending. The summit will also be attended by many US allies, including Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
The summit moves away from the climate approach for the past four years under former President Donald Trump. The former president has repeatedly denied the scientific reality of the climate crisis and his administration has systematically delayed environmental policies.
Trump withdrew from the Paris agreement, but Biden administration officials said work to reduce carbon emissions proceeded equally at the state and local levels, preventing the U.S. from losing too much terrain.
“It’s up to us to continue based on what we’re doing over these four years, so it’s harder for a different administration to turn things around so quickly,” Thomas-Greenfield told Axelrod, who is a political commentator for the CNN.
Biden appointed former Secretary of State John Kerry as his presidential special envoy for climate, a cabinet position that belongs to the National Security Council. The president also named Gina McCarthy, a former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, as his White House climate tsar to head his newly created Office of National Climate Policy.
The climate is a major focus of the president’s nearly $ 2 trillion infrastructure proposal. He said his proposal would create hundreds of thousands of jobs while tackling the climate crisis, reducing emissions and building a “modern, resilient and completely clean network”.
Biden is expected to focus heavily on the economic potential of the fight against climate change. His critics have described attempts to turn the country away from fossil fuels as job killers. But Biden hopes to highlight the opportunities that the technology review would entail to make it cleaner.
“There is only one game book that is working at the moment and this game book is the one that pursues the economic opportunity presented by the fight against the climate crisis and we are doing it,” said the senior administration official .
Officials said they conducted a “techno-economic” analysis in various sectors (including electricity, transportation, buildings, industry, land and oceans) to identify several ways to reduce emissions in each of them. This included the potential for new rules and incentives to limit greenhouse gases.
“The 2030 goal is a goal we believe we can achieve,” senior management said.
As a presidential candidate, Biden proposed a plan to end carbon emissions from power plants in 2035 and proposed wider public investment in green infrastructure, including $ 2 trillion for clean energy projects.
This is a last minute story and will be updated.
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins contributed to this report.