The New York Times
Amid Biden climate pressure, a question awaits: is the word of America good?
WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden faces a fundamental question when he convenes heads of state this week at a virtual summit to declare that the United States is ready to regain a leading role in the fight against climate change: Is the word of America still good? The question is bothering Biden as he tries to confirm the American role in other parts of the world scene after four years of Donald Trump’s America First isolation. Trading partners wonder how long a thawing of multilateral economic agreements can take. Overture to the trans-Atlantic alliance must overcome four years of Trump’s NATO bashing. And on Friday, China compared the United States’ desire to rejoin the global warming deal in Paris, which Trump handed over to a naughty child trying to sneak back to school after cutting the class. Sign up for The Morning Newsletter of the New York Times Perhaps the skepticism about the credibility of the US is nowhere as consequential as about the issue of climate change. “If America can not lead the world to address the climate crisis, we will not have much of a world left,” Foreign Minister Antony Blinken warned in a speech starting a week-long climate push on Monday. has that culminating in the virtual Earth Day. summit meeting Thursday and Friday. The need for American leadership is enormous, a point that Blinken emphasized in his speech at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation headquarters in Annapolis, Maryland, about the most important place that global warming would occupy in American foreign policy. And despite a four-year absence from the climate war, Blinken said America would not hesitate to throw its weight around to ensure other countries do more to reduce their emissions. While other countries produce more than 80% of global warming pollution, he said the United States has a duty to do so. “Our diplomats will challenge the practices of countries whose actions, or inactivity, deter us,” Blinken said. “When countries continue to rely on coal for a significant amount of energy, or invest in new coal plants or allow massive deforestation, they will hear from the United States and our partners how harmful this action is.” Some countries are already pushing back. “The US has chosen to come and go with regard to the Paris Agreement,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said in sharp remarks before the summit on Friday. “Returning to it is by no means a glorious return, but rather the student returning to the class in the right direction.” Biden’s global climate envoy, John Kerry, traveled to China, now the world’s largest emitter, last week to try to persuade Beijing’s leaders to adopt new targets that are in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement to prevent the world temperature above 1.5 degrees Celsius rises from pre-industrial levels. The meetings concluded with an agreement to work together on the climate crisis, but no promises of new targets. Zhao later told reporters that although the United States, while forcing China to do more, “offered nothing about how it intends to make up for the lost four years.” There is good reason for such skepticism. After all, Biden’s summit is the second time in a generation that the United States has entered into climate negotiations again after abandoning a global agreement to reduce planetary greenhouse gases. Biden was vice president when the world applauded the Obama administration for resuming climate talks after its predecessor, George W. Bush, rejected the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change. Now he’s trying to lead a return, while the US returns to the Paris agreement that Trump left in a flashy show of resignation – and perhaps he hopes leaders can not remember the Obama administration’s assurance in 2015 that she climate policy a Republican government can not sustain. “Something that countries around the world are very familiar with is the whiplash from a Republican to a Democrat to a Republican government,” said Robert N. Stavins, an environmental economist at Harvard University, who said: to the heart of long-term credibility. The fact that the trust issues are complicated is that Congress, although the government can declare on Thursday that the United States is ‘back’, still remains divided over climate. Biden is expected to announce on Thursday a new US target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. How ambitious other countries feel that America’s new goal is, and how credible its path to getting there is seen, will largely determine how much the government can produce other countries. to make stronger commitments. Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, has already said that his party will oppose Biden’s $ 2 trillion infrastructure plan, which is the cornerstone of the government’s efforts to achieve current and future climate goals. A group of Republican House leaders also passed legislation last week calling for a major renegotiation of the Paris Agreement and exposing Biden’s plans for global re-involvement. “Anyone who says the United States is united in its work on climate change is drinking Coal Aid because we are not,” said Samantha Gross, director of the Energy Security and Climate Initiative at the Brookings Institution. White House officials said this week the United States remains credible; America is still on track to reach out to the Obama administration to reduce emissions in the economy by about 28% by 2025 by 2005, despite the downturn in the Trump administration. But these numbers can be discussed. This year, however, a study by the Rhodium group estimated that greenhouse gas emissions in the US at the end of 2020 were around 21% below 2005 levels, which puts the country within striking distance of the Obama administration’s promise under the agreement of Paris farm. About a third of the decline was due to the coronavirus pandemic, which sharply curtailed management and business operations last year. Emissions will most likely rise again this year as the economy revives, unless policymakers implement a major new clean energy policy, the study warned. Ali A. Zaidi, the White House’s deputy climate adviser, pointed to another factor that should strengthen American credibility: American promises about the climate go beyond Washington’s word. Yes, Trump abandoned the Paris Agreement. But, he said, “our states and our cities and our businesses and our workers have remained.” Blinken said the United States would “be an example” by investing heavily in clean energy. And he added some warnings to countries he needs as climate partners. He did not mention Brazil, but warned that the destruction of rainforests would not be tolerated. And in an apparent message to China, he said that climate cooperation is not a ‘chip’ that countries can use to investigate ‘bad behavior’ on human rights and other issues. “Climate is not a bargaining chip, it is in the future,” Blinken said. Many diplomats have said they are more cautious this time about the ability of the United States to commit itself to climate change. But they nevertheless tended to give the administration of Biden the benefit of the doubt. “I think US climate change policy is seen as a pendulum,” Malik Amin Aslam, adviser to Pakistan’s climate change adviser, said in an interview. Vulnerable countries are just “glad that the government in Biden has put the pendulum in the right direction,” he added. Ronald J. Jumeau, a former ambassador of the Seychelles to the United Nations and a longtime negotiator on climate change, said he was looking at the announcements of the Biden government with “qualified excitement” and hoped that the United States could follow , not just after reducing emissions. but also financing to small island countries and other vulnerable countries. In addition to reversing climate regulations, Trump has halted payments to the Green Climate Fund to help poorer countries switch to clean energy and adapt to the effects of climate change. Biden has promised to restore funding, with $ 1.2 billion this year, subject to congressional approval. “I think all of us already know the American political system,” Jumeau said. “If we did not learn during the Trump years, we would never learn how dysfunctional it is.” Adam S. Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said America’s contradiction on the world stage began long before Trump. From climate change to international development to trade laws, he said, allies have learned to live with the shifting priorities of Republicans and Democratic governments, as Congress is largely incapable of pursuing key policies. “It is clear that Trump has exacerbated this because of incompetence and overt nationalism,” he said. The problem for the world is that America has all the diplomatic cards on global issues like climate change. “The United States is big and rich and has a nuclear deterrent and two oceans, and there are not that many people who can impose consequences on the United States,” Posen said. “The consequences are the problems that cannot be solved.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company