WASHINGTON – For four years, the rest of the world watched in frustration and a sense of irony as the United States moved away from the Paris Agreement, the global climate pact that had meticulously pressured other countries to join and then abruptly abandoned during the Trump administration.
As of Friday, the United States is back to the agreement, but with a lot of work to do to fulfill its emission cut commitments and restore its reduced position on the world stage.
US emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases plummeted last year, but that was an anomaly due to the coronavirus pandemic, which has slowed large segments of the economy. As the country recovers, emissions are expected to increase again, and President Joe Biden’s government is racing to find ways to put the United States on track to meet even more ambitious goals that scientists say are needed to avoid the worst. effects of global warming.
This is especially true when it comes to rebuilding America’s credibility to persuade China, by far the largest emitter in the world, to act more quickly.
“We have to show that we are not just saying what we say, but moving in the same direction,” said Todd Stern, the top US negotiator for the Obama administration in the 2015 climate deal. “Our ability to make an impact will start at home. Everyone understand that the United States needs a really accelerated effort. “
Biden, just hours after taking an oath on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, signed an executive order returning the US to the climate deal. It takes 30 days after a country delivers its paperwork to the UN for its entry into force, which ends on Friday.
While the Biden government seeks to show seriousness on purpose, a series of carefully choreographed events on Friday will highlight the US’s formal return to the difficult global deal.
Former Secretary of State John Kerry, Biden’s special climate envoy, will be at the front and center, officials said. He will appear with UN Secretary-General António Guterres in the afternoon and join Biden’s domestic climate czar, Gina McCarthy, and his UN climate envoy, Mike Bloomberg, for a morning event to launch the “America Is All In coalition” “, comprised of city, state and business leaders who continued to act on the climate during the Trump years.
In order to show solidarity in the climate with European partners and other allies, Kerry will also participate in a special midday session of the Munich Security Conference and a virtual reception marking the return of the USA, organized by the EU delegation and the embassies of the United Kingdom, Italy, France and Chile. He will answer questions about climate diplomacy at yet another event alongside British and Italian ambassadors.
And Biden must emphasize US action when he participates on Friday in a virtual summit of the Group of Seven and to promote a summit of world leaders on the climate that the US is planning for April, combining with a major focus on climate for the first time. British Minister Boris Johnson, the host of the G-7.
Officials involved in the government’s climate agenda have said that the key message the United States hopes to send is that the Paris Agreement remains intact, having resisted without other countries following the US out of the door – a perspective that climate advocates feared when Donald Trump , months after his presidency, announced that the USA was out.
In the coming months, the Biden government is also expected to develop a new emission cut target, known as the Nationally Determined Contribution, which will determine the achievement of the country’s ambitious goals in the next decade. Under the Paris Agreement, commitments, which are reviewed every five years, are not binding, although other parts of the agreement are.
The previous target, set by President Barack Obama, pledged the United States to reduce emissions by at least 26% by 2025 compared to 2005. In the years since, US emissions have actually decreased, partly stimulated by measures taken during the Obama administration to reduce emissions from power plants, vehicles and other sources – but not enough.
Early data indicates that last year, when emissions were abnormally low because of the pandemic, the country’s emissions were 21.5 percent lower than in 2005, according to the Rhodium Group, an independent researcher who tracks the data emissions. But in 2019, before the coronavirus scanned the world, the United States was only about half close to its target, with emissions 12% below 2005 levels, as opposed to the 26% target.
With Trump’s withdrawal from the pact, the 2025 target has become technically debatable. Biden’s new target will specify the reductions the United States will seek to achieve by 2030.
“In that sense, we are starting from scratch,” said Nat Keohane, senior vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund, a nonprofit advocacy group.
The Biden government plans to announce the new target in April, when Biden will convene a summit of world leaders on climate, several American officials said. In the long run, Biden pledged the United States to achieve zero net emissions across the economy by 2050, long after he stepped down.
How Biden will seek to achieve these goals is an open question. But the efforts are likely to involve a combination of regulations to enact stricter emission limits for vehicles, power plants and industry; incentives to move the US more quickly towards electric cars and renewable energy; and potentially a market-based mechanism to force reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, such as a tax or carbon tax or an emissions trading scheme, said people familiar with the Biden government’s deliberations.
All of this requires a sudden change in the policies adopted by the Trump administration, which sought to undo the regulations of the Obama era and provide incentives for economic growth, placing less strict limits on the industry.
“In fact, there was no contribution from the United States government” during Trump’s years, Guterres, the UN secretary general, said on Thursday. Still, he said, the rest of American society continued to accelerate in the climate, despite Trump, positioning the U.S. as “totally on the way to net zero by 2050”.
Other countries are also watching closely to see if the United States will live up to its commitments to the Green Climate Fund, created to allow poorer and developing countries to reduce emissions by shifting some of the costs to the wealthier countries that have historically endured the most of the blame for climate change. The United States gave only about a third of the $ 3 billion that the Obama administration promised; Kerry said the Biden government would “make up” the total amount.
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The US has historically contributed more to global emissions than any other country, but rapidly developing China now leads the world in greenhouse gas emissions, and has continued to build coal plants, even though President Xi Jinping has set a target zero emissions from China by 2060.
“It is not enough for the United States to return to Paris. We have to start cutting our emissions to be able to put pressure on countries like China, whose emissions are still growing,” said Paul Bledsoe, climate adviser to the Clinton administration. strategic consultant to the Progressive Policy Institute, a nonprofit advocacy group.
In the early weeks of Biden’s presidency, China’s hawks expressed concern that the eagerness to pursue climate diplomacy with Beijing, one of Kerry’s top priorities, could lead the Biden government to be more lenient with China at other points of contention. , such as trade, human rights and aggressive Beijing actions in the region.
Kerry promised that other national security issues will not be harmed by the climate, calling it a “critical and autonomous issue” that he hopes the US can pursue with Beijing, even if the relationship goes sour on other fronts.