Kerry formalizes the return of the US to the international climate fight: “We return with humility”

After four years of absence, the United States, which was a key player in closing the Paris Agreement in 2015, has returned on Monday to participate in an international climate summit. John Kerry, President Joe Biden’s new special envoy against warming, spoke today at the multilateral meeting on adaptation to climate change organized by the Government of the Netherlands. “We’re proud to be back,” Kerry said. “We are back, I want you to know, with humility,” added the Democrat, who also regretted the four years of absence from his country.

In addition to being absent from these summits, the Donald Trump Administration pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement, an exit that became official on November 4. It was the second climate scare of the country that has contributed the most historically to warming, since it never ratified the Kyoto Protocol. But many aspects of the Paris Agreement were molded so that the U.S. could join smoothly. Perhaps that is why the message that Kerry is conveying in public and in private to his international colleagues since he was confirmed in office last week is that of that return “with humility”, something that this Monday he has promised again. “We need the United States at the centre of action against climate change,” Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte later admitted.

Kerry has explained that the entire US Administration and federal agencies will now be engaged in the fight against climate change. “We are committed to the world,” Insisted Biden’s special envoy at this meeting, thus reinforcing the commitment to multilateralism. Now, the U.S. must finalize its plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions for this decade.

Among the executive orders that the U.S. president signed on his first day in office last week is the return of the United States to the Paris Agreement. The U.S. will officially be back inside in mid-February. Formally, this country will have been just three months out of the international pact against global warming. But the truth is that in the four years of Trump’s mandate the US Administration has been absent from any international effort to combat climate change.

Biden’s team, however, has now placed the climate crisis among the immediate priorities. And, according to the list released by the White House last Wednesday, the Democratic Administration is committed to taking “swift action to address the climate emergency” and “lead the clean energy revolution.”

“Very positive and very serious signals are being sent,” explains David Howell, a climate negotiation expert at seo/BirdLife. “For example, with the equipment that’s being assembled,” Howell says. Among that team stands out, logically, Kerry, who was one of the promoters of the signing of the Paris Agreement during the last term of Barack Obama.

“We’re a lot more optimistic than we were a year ago,” Howell says. And among the reasons for being so is the room for maneuver that the team of Kerry and Kamala Harris will have thanks to the Democrats controlling the two legislative chambers. “They will be able to go beyond what Obama was, who had a limited margin,” Howell says. Thanks to that majority in the House and Senate, Democrats will be able to pass more robust plans to underpin a green transition. And to overturn the changes undertaken by Trump, who has reversed about a hundred environmental standards during his term that affected, for example, the efficiency of car fuels, emissions from power plants and methane.

“You can be remembered as the president of the climate,” 150 personalities from the world of politics or business, such as IKEA President Jesper Brodin, and several European parliamentarians, wrote to Biden this weekend. “This is the most decisive decade in human history to address the climate crisis,” they said in a letter published in The New York Times.

Biden’s green program for the election proposed a two-trillion-dollar clean investment plan to help the United States achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, meaning that by that date the U.S. economy will only be able to expel into the atmosphere the amount of greenhouse gases that its sinks (mainly, forests) are able to absorb. 100% emission-free electricity generation was also promised by 2035.

Returning to the Paris Agreement is the easiest part of the job ahead of the Biden Administration. All countries adhering to the agreement must submit plans to cut their greenhouse gas emissions (known as NDCs) for this decade. “We’re all watching the commitment the U.S. presents now,” Howell says. When Obama joined the pact in 2015, his administration set a 2025 cut target of between 26% and 28% from 2005 levels. According to the consultancy Rhodium Group, in 2020 US emissions have been 21% below 2005 levels, but a very large part of that cut is due to the crisis generated by covid.

The Biden Administration has yet to make public its 2030 target, its NDC. But Kerry has explained that work is underway on that plan and will be announced shortly. Also, national and international climate finance commitments.

Because another of the doubts that the new US Administration will have to clear is its contribution to international climate finance, which should serve for the least developed countries to face the consequences of climate change. Kerry has warned of the effects warming will have on developing countries. “An increase of between 3.7 and 4.5 degrees, which is where we are going now, will harm the most vulnerable on earth leading to unbearable living conditions,” he said. “There is simply no way to adapt to a world with a rise of 3 or 4 degrees in temperature,” he insisted.

However, the US has been reducing its contributions since 2017 to that climate finance. Now, with the change of Government, it is expected that the funds allocated to this chapter of international cooperation will increase. The commitment of all the signatories of the Paris Agreement was that developed countries should mobilize 100,000 million dollars annually from 2020. But the OECD’s most recent monitoring report suggests that climate finance provided and mobilized by developed countries in 2018 — the last year for which data are closed — stood at $78.9 billion.

Source: The Country