WASHINGTON (AP) – President Joe Biden includes rivals Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China among guests at the first major talks on his administration’s climate, an event the U.S. hopes will help to shape, accelerate and deepen global efforts to reduce pollution from fossil fuels that destroyed the climate, administration officials told The Associated Press.
The president wants to revive a forum convened by the United States on the world’s major climate economies, which George W. Bush and Barack Obama used and which Donald Trump let languish. Leaders of some of the world’s most affected by climate change, beneficiaries and non-slip complete the rest of the 40 invitations delivered on Friday. It will be held practically on April 22 and 23.
The organization of the summit will live up to Biden’s campaign promise and executive order, and the administration is scheduling the event to coincide with the very announcement of the next purpose of what will be a much tougher American goal. to revive the U.S. economy to drastically reduce coal emissions, naturally. gas and oil.
The session, and whether it is talks or some progress, will test Biden’s commitment to making climate change a priority among competing political, economic, political and pandemic issues. It will also be a very public (and potentially embarrassing or empowering) test of whether American leaders, and Biden in particular, can still drive global decision-making after the Trump administration retires globally and has shaken long-standing alliances. .
The Biden administration intentionally looked beyond its international partners for the summit, contacting key leaders for what they said would sometimes be tough talks on climate, an administration official said. The officer spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss U.S. plans for the event.
Trump mocked the science behind the urgent warnings about global warming and the consequent worsening of droughts, floods, hurricanes and other natural disasters. It withdrew the United States from the 2015 UN climate agreements in Paris as one of its first actions. This makes next month’s summit the first major international discussions on the climate of an American leader in more than four years, although European and other leaders have held talks.
U.S. officials and a few others give the Obama administration’s climate talks a share of the credit for laying the groundwork for the Paris agreement. The United States and about 200 other governments in these talks set goals to reduce their fossil fuel emissions and pledged to monitor and report on their emissions. Another Biden administration official said the US is still deciding how far the administration will go in setting a more ambitious emissions target in the United States.
The Biden administration hopes that the stage scheduled for next month’s Earth Day climate summit, scheduled to be virtual due to COVID-19 and can be seen publicly on the live broadcast, including talks from break, encourage other international leaders to use it as a platform to announce their own country’s toughest emissions targets or other commitments, ahead of the UN’s global climate talks in Glasgow.
The administration hopes that, more broadly, the session will demonstrate its commitment to reducing emissions at home and promoting it abroad, the official said. This includes encouraging governments to move forward in specific and politically bearable ways to reorganize their transportation and energy sectors and their economies in general to achieve these tougher future goals, which the Biden administration has just embarked on.
Like the climate forums of the major Bush and Obama economies, Biden’s guest list includes leaders from the world’s largest economies and European blocs. This includes two countries – Russia and China – against which Biden and his diplomats clash over electoral interference, cyber attacks, human rights and other issues. It is unclear how these two countries in particular will respond to U.S. invitations or whether they are willing to cooperate with the U.S. in reducing emissions while engaging in other issues. China is the world’s largest emitter of climate-damaging pollution. The United States is number 2. Russia is number 4.
Climate scientists and climate policy experts largely welcomed Biden’s international openness to climate negotiations, especially dissemination in China.
“China is by far the largest emitter in the world. Russia needs to do more to reduce its emissions. Not including these countries because they are not doing enough would be like launching an anti-smoking campaign, but not targeting smokers, ”said Nigel Purvis, who has worked in climate diplomacy in previous Democratic and Republican administrations.
Ideally, government leaders in China and other major economies should look for opportunities to talk about specific issues, such as whether a broad agreement on fixing any price of carbon emissions is possible, said Bob Inglis. former Republican lawmaker working to involve conservatives and conservative approaches in climate efforts. “That’s why this kind of disclosure makes sense.”
Brazil is on the list as a major economy, but it is also a major anti-climate factor under President Jair Bolsonaro, who derailed efforts to preserve the carbon-sucking Amazon and joined Trump in stepping down. international climate commitments.
The 40 guests also include country leaders facing some of the most serious immediate threats, including the lowlands of Bangladesh and the Marshall Islands, countries considered to be models of good climate behavior, including Bhutan and some Scandinavian countries. , and African nations with large carbon sink forests. or large oil reserves. Some see Poland and some other countries on the list possibly open to moving away more quickly from the waste energy of coal.
Biden, as a candidate, pledged $ 2 trillion in investment to help transform the United States into a zero-emission economy by 2050 while building clean energy and technology jobs. Biden and other administration officials have been stressing U.S. climate intentions during early individual talks with foreign leaders, and Biden climate envoy John Kerry has focused on overseas diplomacy to boost climatic efforts.
Biden discussed the summit in a conversation Friday with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and the two leaders agreed on the need to keep ambitious emission reduction targets, the White House said.