WASHINGTON (AP) – President Joe Biden is including rivals Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China among the guests for his government’s first major climate negotiations, an event the United States hopes will help shape, accelerate and deepen Global efforts to eliminate climate-damaging fossil fuel pollution, government officials told The Associated Press.
The president is trying to revive a forum of the world’s major climate economies, convened by the United States, which George W. Bush and Barack Obama used and Donald Trump left to languish. Leaders of some of the main victims of climate change, benefactors and apostates complete the remainder of the 40 invitations delivered on Friday. It will be held virtually on April 22 and 23.
Hosting the summit will fulfill a campaign promise and an executive order from Biden, and the government is planning the event with its own announcement that it is a much tougher U.S. goal to renew the U.S. economy to dramatically reduce coal emissions, natural gas and oil.
The session – whether it’s just conversation or some progress – will test Biden’s promise to make climate change a priority among political, economic, political and pandemic problems. It will also represent a very public – and potentially embarrassing or empowering test – of whether U.S. leaders, and Biden in particular, can still drive global decision-making after the Trump administration has withdrawn globally and has shaken long-standing alliances.
The Biden government intentionally looked beyond its international partners to the negotiations, said a government official.
“It is a list of the main participants and it is about having some of the difficult and important conversations,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the US plans for the event. “Given how important … this issue is for the whole world, we have to be willing to talk about it and we have to be willing to talk about it at high levels.”
Trump scoffed at the science behind urgent warnings about global warming and the aggravation resulting from droughts, floods, hurricanes and other natural disasters. He withdrew the United States from the UN climate agreements in 2015 as one of his first actions. This makes next month’s summit the first major international climate debate by a US leader in more than four years, although leaders in Europe and elsewhere have held talks.
US officials and some others give the climate discussions of the main economies of the Obama administration part of the credit for laying the groundwork for the Paris agreement. The United States and almost 200 other governments in these negotiations have set targets to reduce their fossil fuel emissions and have pledged to monitor and report their emissions. Another Biden government official said the United States is still deciding how far the government will set a more ambitious emissions target for the United States.
The Biden government hopes that the stage provided by the Earth Day climate summit next month – planned to be entirely virtual because of COVID-19 and all publicly visible on the live stream, including conversations – will encourage other international leaders to use it as a platform to announce their own countries’ toughest emission targets or other commitments, ahead of the UN’s global climate negotiations in November in Glasgow.
The government hopes that, more broadly, the session will help encourage governments to adopt specific and politically bearable ways of reorganizing their transport and energy sectors and economies in general now to meet these more difficult future goals.
The US summit is not just “about the bottom line, it’s really about involvement at the leader level … sending a signal from the US perspective on how serious we are and putting our own cards on the table in a meaningful way”, said the first official, referring to Biden’s next announcement about a more aggressive US emissions target. “And hoping that countries will join us.”
Like the climate forums of the major economies of Bush and Obama, Biden’s guest list includes leaders from the world’s largest economies and European blocs. This includes two countries – Russia and China – that Biden and his diplomats are fighting against because of electoral interference, cyber attacks, human rights and other issues. It is unclear how these two countries in particular will respond to US invitations, or whether they are willing to cooperate with the US in cutting emissions while discussing other topics. China is the world’s largest emitter of climate-damaging pollution. The USA is in second place. Russia is in fourth place.
Brazil is on the list as a big economy, but it is also a big deviant from the climate under President Jair Bolsonaro, who hindered efforts to preserve the carbon-absorbing Amazon, and joined Trump to run over international climate commitments.
The 40 guests also include leaders from countries facing some of the most serious immediate threats, including Bangladesh and the Marshall Islands, countries seen as models of good climate behavior, including Bhutan and some Scandinavian countries, and African nations with varied carbon sinks from forests or large oil reserves. Poland and a few other countries on the list are seen as possibly open to moving away more quickly from dirty coal energy.
Biden as a candidate pledged $ 2 trillion in investments to help transform the United States into a zero-emission economy by 2050, while creating jobs in clean energy and technology. Biden and other government officials have emphasized US climate intentions during their first face-to-face conversations with foreign leaders, and Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry, has focused on accelerating emissions cuts internationally in foreign diplomacy. .