Biden invites world leaders to summit against Climate Change

U.S. President Joe Biden invited 40 world leaders to a virtual summit on climate change, including the leaders of China, Xi Jinping, and Russia, Vladimir Putin, with whom he has a relationship of rivalry.

According to the White House, the meeting, which will be held on April 22 and 23, has been invited to the leaders of 17 countries that are responsible for 80% of global emissions, as well as the leaders of other nations that suffer the effects of Climate Change or that have shown willingness to combat it.

The White House also announced that before the summit it will announce “ambitious goals” to reduce carbon emissions under the umbrella of the Paris Agreement, from which the US left under the government of Donald Trump (2017-2021) and to which Biden rejoined on his first day in the White House.

The goal of the summit is to invite other countries to formulate their own commitments to reduce greenhouse gases, the White House said.

Among the invited Latin American leaders are the presidents of Argentina, Alberto Fernández; Colombia, Iván Duque; Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro; Chile, Sebastián Piñera; and Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Also expected to attend the meeting are European Commission (EC) President Ursula Von der Leyen; German Chancellor Angela Merkel; French President Emmanuel Macron; the President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez; as well as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Other guests include Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan; and Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdulaziz, who leads the country with the world’s largest proven oil reserves.

The White House hopes that the meeting, which Washington will host, will serve to prepare for the Glasgow Climate Summit (COP26), which was supposed to have been held at the end of November 2020, but was postponed due to the pandemic and is scheduled to take place between November 1 and 12 of this year.

Before Biden, other presidents such as George W. Bush (2001-2009) and Barack Obama (2009-2017) convened similar summits with heads of state and government from around the world to address the problem of climate change.

Trump, however, stopped hosting those meetings and, during his tenure, rescinded dozens of environmental regulations; and always sided with the fossil fuel sector. Faced with this, Biden wants to make the climate crisis one of the central axes of his government.

To do this, he created the post of U.S. special climate envoy, for which he appointed former Secretary of State John Kerry. He has also promised to invest $1.7 trillion in clean energy; and will cause the United States to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050.

Source: Energy Today