Scientist Michael Mann argued that the United States should go “far beyond the Paris commitments” as President Joe Biden re-joined the Paris Climate Agreement on Friday.
“We have to increase commitments now if we are to stay on course to avoid a catastrophic warming of three degrees Fahrenheit,” said Mann, the author of “The New Climate War”, during an interview on Friday night in “The News with Shepard Smith. “” We have to increase our commitments and the other countries in the world have to do this. “
The move to reinsert the Paris Climate Agreement was a departure from the Trump administration’s climate policy. In 2017, former President Donald Trump announced his intention to withdraw from the deal. He formally notified the United Nations in 2019, and the U.S. left the Paris Agreement the following year after a waiting period. Mann explained that, during that time, the United States “lost four years of opportunity here to face the biggest challenge we face”.
Joel Rubin, a former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Obama-Biden administration, told The News with Shepard Smith that there is now a higher standard set for the United States’ return to the global climate battle.
“The world has left the American leadership in the climate and will be skeptical about our commitment to stay engaged,” said the national security expert who worked on both climate change policy and renewable energy programs under the Clinton and Bush governments. “This has always been the albatross surrounding the American role in multilateral climate diplomacy – a lack of strong legislative support for that.”
Internally, the Texas crisis exposed how vulnerable power grids can be during extreme weather conditions, which experts warn could worsen because of climate change. Homeland Security Adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall even stressed the danger of climate change during a press conference at the White House on Thursday.
“The extreme weather events we are experiencing this week in the center, south and now in the east of the United States demonstrate once again that climate change is real and is happening now, and we are not adequately prepared for it,” Sherwood-Randall said.
Mann explained that climate change may be a factor contributing to the distress in Texas amid freezing temperatures.
“There is some evidence that climate change may be leading to an increase in incidents of this type of event, but there is no doubt that if we look collectively at all the extreme weather events that we have seen in recent years, the unprecedented heat waves and droughts and forest fires and super storms, we can see the fingerprint of human influence on our climate in these devastating events, “said Mann.
Rubin said Biden’s next task is to pass legislation to create significant changes in reducing America’s carbon footprint, so what happened in Texas doesn’t happen more often.
“Doing so would not only be a strong signal to the world that we are serious, but it would also break the Gordian knot that has undermined America’s credibility on the global stage when it comes to combating climate change,” said Rubin. “It is a necessary political battle. It will be brutal, but the alternative of not having it is much worse.”