WASHINGTON (AP) – President Joe Biden counts rivals Vladimir Putin from Russia and Xi Jinping from China among the invitees to his administration’s first major climate talks, an event the US hopes will help shape global austerity efforts and deepen. climate-destroying fossil fuel pollution, government officials told The Associated Press.
The president is trying to revive a US-convened forum of the world’s largest climate economies, which George W. Bush and Barack Obama both used and left Donald Trump languishing. Leaders of some of the world’s greatest climate change sufferers, benefactors and apostates round out the rest of the 40 invitations delivered FridayIt will be held almost April 22 and 23.
Hosting the summit will fulfill a campaign promise and executive order from Biden, and the government is timing the event to coincide with its own upcoming announcement of what will be a much more difficult US goal for revamping the US economy to the emissions of coal, natural gas and oil.
The session – and whether it’s all talk, or any progress – will test Biden’s promise to make climate change a priority among competing political, economic, policy and pandemic issues. It will also provide a very public – and potentially embarrassing or empowering – test of whether American leaders, and Biden in particular, can still guide global decision-making after the Trump administration has withdrawn globally and shook long-lasting alliances.
The Biden administration deliberately looked beyond its international partners for the summit and reached out to key leaders for what it believed would be sometimes harsh talks on climate issues, a government official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss US plans for the event.
Trump scoffed at the science underlying urgent warnings about global warming and the resulting exacerbation of droughts, floods, hurricanes and other natural disasters. He withdrew the United States as one of his first actions from the UN climate accords in Paris of 2015. That makes next month’s summit the first major international climate discussions by an American leader in more than four years, although leaders in Europe and elsewhere the talks have continued.
US officials and a few others give the climate discussions of the Obama administration’s major economies some of the credit for laying the groundwork for the Paris Accord. In those discussions, the United States and nearly 200 other governments each set targets for reducing their fossil fuel emissions, and pledged to monitor and report their emissions. Another Biden government official said the US is still deciding how far the government will go in setting a more ambitious US emissions target.
Biden’s government hopes that the stage provided by next month’s Earth Day climate summit – scheduled to be fully virtual due to COVID-19 and publicly seen on live stream, including breakout talks – will encourage other international leaders to to use it as a platform to announce their own. stricter country emission targets or other commitments, ahead of the UN global climate talks in Glasgow in November.
The government hopes more broadly that the session will demonstrate its commitment to reduce emissions domestically and encourage the same abroad, the official said. That includes encouraging governments to engage in specific, politically tolerable ways to redesign their transportation and energy sectors and overall economies now to achieve those tougher future goals, something the Biden administration is just getting into.
Like Bush and Obama’s climate forums for major economies, Biden’s invite list features leaders from the world’s largest economies and European blocs. That includes two countries – Russia and China – that Biden and his diplomats bump into over election interference, cyber-attacks, human rights and other issues. It is not clear how those two countries in particular will respond to the US invitations, or whether they are willing to work with the US to cut emissions while sparring on other topics. China is the world’s largest cause of climate-damaging pollution. The US is No. 2. Russia is No. 4.
Climate scientists and climate policy experts have largely welcomed Biden’s international overture on climate negotiations, particularly its reach to China.
“China is by far the largest emitter in the world. Russia must 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 worked on climate diplomacy in previous Democratic and Republican governments.
Ideally, government leaders from China and other major economies will look for opportunities to talk about specific matters, such as whether broad agreement is possible on how to set a price for carbon emissions, said Bob Inglis, a former Republican lawmaker who works for conservatives and conservative approaches to climate efforts. “That’s why this kind of outreach makes sense.”
Brazil is listed as a major economy, but it’s also a major downturn in climate under President Jair Bolsonaro, who derailed conservation efforts for the carbon-sucking Amazon and, along with Trump, trampled international climate commitments.
The 40 invitees also include leaders of countries facing some of the greatest immediate threats, including low-lying Bangladesh and the Marshall Islands, countries seen as models for good climate behavior, including Bhutan and some Scandinavian countries, and African countries with large carbon reservoirs. or large oil reserves. Poland and some other countries on the list are seen by some as potentially open to a faster distance from dirty coal power plants.
Biden as a candidate pledged $ 2 trillion in investment to help transform the US into a zero-emission economy by 2050 while creating clean energy and technology jobs. Biden and other government officials have highlighted US climate intentions during early one-on-one talks with foreign leaders, and Biden climate envoy John Kerry has focused on diplomacy abroad to boost climate efforts.
Biden discussed the summit in a meeting with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Friday, with both leaders agreeing on the need to keep emissions reduction targets ambitious, the White House said.