displaying the live election results in Florida at Black Lives
Matter plaza across from the White House on election day in
Washington, DC on November 3, 2020.Olivier DOULIERY /
AFP
The United States left the Paris accord on Wednesday,
becoming the first country to ever withdraw from an international
climate change pact, but Joe Biden vowed he would
immediately return as president.
With election results pointing to a likely defeat for Donald
Trump in Tuesday’s election, Biden took on the tone of a
president-elect and made clear that climate was a top priority.
“Today, the Trump Administration officially left the Paris
Climate Agreement. And in exactly 77 days,
a Biden Administration will rejoin it,”
tweeted Biden, who would take the presidential oath on January
20.
Biden has proposed a $1.7 trillion-plan to take the US, the
world’s second biggest carbon emitter, to net zero by 2050.
Trump has aggressively championed the fossil fuel industry,
questioned the science of climate change and weakened other
environmental protections.
However, a report last month by the group America’s Pledge found
that even without help from Washington, action from cities, states
and businesses would still make it possible for the US to cut
emissions by 37 percent by 2030.
Trump gave a one-year notice to leave the Paris accord on
November 4, 2019. Biden would need to officially notify
the UN of US willingness to return.
Such a notification would be “the easy part,” Andrew Light, a
climate advisor to former president Barack Obama, told AFP.
The US will still be “outside the conversation” when Britain and
the UN host a climate summit on December 12, the fifth anniversary
of Paris, but poised to re-engage.
According to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
in order to have a chance of keeping end-of-century warming below
1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), global emissions need
to reach net zero around mid-century.
The target warming level was chosen to avoid triggering a series
of catastrophic climate tipping points that could force humanity to
inhabit only the planet’s far north and south latitudes.
Niklas Hohne, a climate scientist at Wageningen Univers ity in
the Netherlands and a member of a simulation group called Climate
Action Tracker, wrote on Twitter that “Biden’s climate plan alone
could reduce temperature increase in the order of 0.1°C.
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“This election could be a make or break point for international
climate policy. Every tenth of a degree counts,” he said.
Credibility gap
Environmentalists say Trump’s announcement that he would
withdraw from the Paris agreement three years ago made it easier
for countries such Australia, Saudi Arabia and Brazil to weaken
their own ambitions.
Many of the ravaging impacts of climate change are already felt
today: loss of sea ice, with the Arctic expected to be ice-free by
mid-century; accelerated sea level rise, longer and more intense
droughts and heat waves, stronger hurricanes and shifts in
precipitation patterns.
Small island nations face being completely submerged.
Even if the US rejoins, it will face a credibility gap — after
all, it was also an architect of the Kyoto agreement that it never
ratified.
29, 2019 shows an iceberg floating in Bonavista Bay in
Newfoundland, Canada. The extent of sea ice in the Arctic was at
record lows for October, Danish researchers said Wednesday, October
28, 2020, adding the unusually warm season meant it was not
recovering as fast as normal. Johannes EISELE / AFP
That makes it crucial to ensure a shift towards climate action
is permanent and not something a future Republican administration
will just undo, said Light.
“We know from polling that acting on climate is not this red
versus blue, Republican versus Democrat issue out there in the real
world,” he said, with a recent Pew poll finding more than 80
percent of Americans in agreement that humans contribute to climate
change, including a plurality of Republicans.
Key to this plan will be Biden delivering on his
pledge of massive economic stimulus and job creation.
There are already signs that market forces are starting to tip
the energy balance from fossil fuels to renewables, but the
transition has far to go.
Despite Trump’s efforts to revive the coal industry, more
capacity was retired under his presidency than during Obama’s
second term, while renewable energy hit record highs in production
and consumption in 2019.
Natural gas, driven by hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,”
continues to drive the energy mix, accounting for 35 percent of
production.
Biden views the fuel as a “bridge” to renewable energy and
has said he won’t ban fracking.
UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric on Wednesday highlighted recent
commitments by South Korea and Japan as signs of progress.
“There is a growing coalition of nations committed to achieving
carbon neutrality by mid-century,” Stephane said.
“Our support, our belief in the need for strong and active Paris
Agreement remains unchanged,” he added.
AFP