President Biden arrived at the United Nations climate talks on Friday with environmental bona fides that few other American presidents can claim. He muscled through a landmark climate law that is pouring $370 billion into the effort to speed the American economy away from fossil fuels. He has seeded climate policy across the federal government. His administration plans to enact the strongest regulation to date to reduce methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
Mr. Biden is also buoyed by a surprisingly strong showing of his party in Tuesday’s midterm elections, a performance that bucked historical trends and may allow the Democrats to retain control of Congress.
“Joe Biden, in my book, is a genuine climate hero,” former Vice President Al Gore said during an interview at the summit.
But is it enough? All week, representatives from developing nations have been excoriating the United States and other major industrialized nations for generating the pollution that is driving climate change. And while every nation on the planet has felt the impact of global warming, in the form of intensifying floods, drought, heat and wildfires, poor nations are disproportionately struggling from a crisis they did little to cause. They are also demanding that the United States and other wealthy nations pay for the damage.
“There is more than enough money in this economy,” said Wanjira Mathai, an environmentalist and activist from Kenya. “There was plenty out there when Covid happened and economies need to be shored up — $17 trillion showed up. There’s money. We have a crisis in empathy.”
For decades, wealthy nations, which have emitted half of all heat-trapping gasses since 1850, have avoided calls to compensate poor countries for climate disasters, fearing that doing so could open them to unlimited liability. And, as a legal and a practical matter, it has been extraordinarily difficult to define “loss and damage” and determine what it might cost and who should pay how much.
But this week several European leaders have answered those calls with cash pledges, putting pressure on Mr. Biden to do the same.
Paul Bledsoe, a climate adviser under President Bill Clinton who now lectures at American University, said there was no way Mr. Biden would embrace the idea of loss and damage payments.
“America is culturally incapable of meaningful reparations,” he said. “Having not made them to Native Americans or African Americans, there is little to no chance they will be seriously considered regarding climate impacts to foreign nations. It’s a complete nonstarter in our domestic politics.”
John Kerry, Mr. Biden’s climate envoy, has proposed instead to let corporations invest in renewable-energy projects in developing countries that would allow them to claim the resulting cuts in greenhouse gases against their own climate goals. Those so-called carbon offset initiatives are viewed skeptically by many climate scientists and activists, who see them as simply allowing companies to continue polluting.
Before addressing the gathering, Mr. Biden is scheduled to meet with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt and is expected to raise the case of Alaa Abd El Fattah, an Egyptian dissident whose hunger strike in prison has loomed over the summit. Mr. Abd El Fattah had said he would stop drinking water last Sunday, at the start of the COP27 summit. Representatives of nongovernmental groups have threatened to walk out of the conference if he dies.
Demonstrators, who are a mainstay at U.N. climate summits, have been muted all week at this gathering because of tight restrictions imposed by Mr. Sisi’s government. But on Friday morning, about 100 people from Fridays for Future, a youth-led and organized climate movement, as well as protesters urging a vegan diet and activists opposed to oil and gas drilling in Africa, made their presence known inside the area at the summit that is under the control of the United Nations.
Friday is the midpoint of the two-week summit.
Source NY Times
BDST: 2112 HRS, NOV 11, 2022
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