The United States officially returned to the global climate agreement in Paris on Friday, and US leaders declared that the country could not afford to ever tip the growing climate crisis again.
“Climate change and science diplomacy can never again be ‘add-ons’ in our foreign policy discussions,” Foreign Minister Antony Blinken said in a statement in a day of Biden’s administrative outreach to global and domestic audiences. on the US commitment to reduce climate-damaging fossil fuel emissions.
“Addressing the real threats to climate change and listening to our scientists is at the heart of our domestic and foreign policy priorities,” Blinken said. “This is crucial in our discussions of national security, migration, international health efforts and in our economic diplomacy and trade talks.”
Officially, President Donald Trump’s removal of the country from the global climate agreement stood only 107 days. This was part of Trump’s withdrawal from global fidelity in general and his often outspoken but false view. that the ongoing global warming was a ridiculous mistake by the world’s scientists.
While the return of Friday is highly symbolic, world leaders say they expect America to prove its seriousness after four years of being fairly absent. In particular, they expect an announcement from the US in the coming months on their goal of reducing emissions from heat gases by 2030.
The US returns to the Paris Agreement became official on Friday, almost a month after President Joe Biden told the United Nations that America wanted to return. “A call for survival is coming from the planet,” Biden said in his inaugural address. A cry that can no longer be desperate or clear.
On his first day in office, Biden signed an executive order reversing Trump’s resignation. The Trump administration has announced its withdrawal of the Paris Agreement in 2019, but it is only in force on 4 November 2020, the day after the election, due to the provisions of the agreement.
The United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Thursday that official US re-entry was “very important in itself”, as was Biden’s announcement that the US would return to easing climate aid to poorer countries, as promised in 2009.
“This is the political message that is being sent,” said Christiana Figueres, former United Nations climate chief. She was one of the leading forces to hammer out the most voluntary agreement of 2015, in which countries set their own goals to reduce greenhouse gases.
One fear was that other nations would follow America to abandon the climate war, but no one did, Figueres said. She said the real issue was four years of climate inactivity by the Trump administration. U.S. cities, states, and businesses still worked to capture carbon dioxide with heat, but without the federal government.
“From a political symbolism perspective, whether it’s 100 days or four years, it’s basically the same,” Figueres said. “It’s not about how many days. It is the political symbolism that the largest economy refuses the opportunity to address climate change. ”
“We lost too much time,” Figueres said.
Inger Andersen, director of the United Nations Environment Program, said the United States should prove its leadership to the rest of the world, but said it would no doubt question whether it met the required emission reduction targets. The Biden government promises to announce them ahead of an Earth Day summit in April.
“We hope it will have a very significant reduction in emissions and that they will be an example for other countries to follow,” Guterres said. Already more than 120 countries, including China which is the largest issuer, have promised that they will have net carbon emissions by the middle of the century.
University of Maryland Environment Professor Nate Hultman, who worked on the Obama administration’s official Paris goal in Paris, said he expects a 2030 target to reduce carbon dioxide emissions between 40% and 50% reduction from the 2005 base levels.
Wyoming Senator John Barrasso, the top Republican in the Senate’s energy panel, criticized Biden for rejoining Paris, tweeting: ‘Returning to the Paris climate agreement will increase Americans’ energy costs and not solve climate change . The Biden government will set unworkable targets for the United States, while China and Russia can continue business as usual. ″
A long-standing international goal, included in the Paris Agreement with an even stricter target, is to keep below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times. The world has since warmed to 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit).
The US re-joining the Paris Agreement and achieving an ambitious goal of reducing emissions will “limit global warming” to well below 2 degrees – not just 2 degrees but below 2 degrees – more likely, “said climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, Energy. and climate director for the Breakthrough Institute.
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Associated Press author Matthew Daly contributed to this report.
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Read stories on climate issues by The Associated Press at https://apnews.com/hub/climate.
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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter @borenbears.
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