Biden pledges international finance plan as he presides over virtual global climate summit

In one of the most surreal summit meetings ever, President Biden on Thursday hosted more than 40 world leaders in a bid to restore the United States’ damaged diplomatic reputation and to rally nations around the globe to make deeper cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.

With Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and special presidential envoy for climate John F. Kerry seated around a horseshoe-shaped table in the East Room of the White House, the faces of presidents and prime ministers flashed by on a large screen, one by one putting forth their own limited plans for meeting the goals of the 2015 Paris climate accord.

Biden kicked off the meeting promising to cut U.S. emissions to half of their 2005 levels by the end of the decade. Several other world leaders also pledged to speed up cuts to their own emissions, restore forests, phase out coal plants, and put people to work building wind turbines and solar panels. And many leaders beseeched the world to act more urgently — and find more money — to help nations already grappling with existential threats from rising seas and other impacts.

An ambitious agenda, complicated and nuanced subject matter, a U.S. president given to unscripted blurts and 40 world leaders, including some with beefs against the United States, at an open mic. All on the equivalent of a giant Zoom call. What could go wrong?

As it happened, not much, despite the oddity of President Biden’s task: reestablishing the country as a reliable global leader on climate change at a marquee global summit conducted via pandemic-mandated video remote.

A few participants took the opportunity to tweak Washington as an inconsistent advocate for action. Others puffed up their nation’s past contributions or pleaded a special case that their smaller, poorer nations should be held to a different standard.

But the overriding sentiment from the global leaders was one of relief and receptivity to having the United States back in the fold after four years of President Donald Trump. Biden collected plaudits for recommitting the United States to focus on the crisis of a warming planet and reversing the policies of his predecessor.

Over the years, I’ve found that there is a pretty widespread lack of familiarity with how climate change actually works and what contributes to it. So I decided it was worth putting together something of a primer on the subject, centered on how it is measured.

The natural place to begin is by explaining how the warming process works.

If you live in a house in a cold-weather climate, you are probably aware that your attic is insulated. That’s to keep heat in your house and prevent it from escaping into the outside air. The Earth is not similarly insulated, so heat often radiates off the planet’s surface and into space.

Sometimes, though, that heat radiates into the atmosphere, where it is absorbed by one of the countless gas molecules floating around up there, a layer of protection that has an insulating effect. Some of those molecules, excited (literally) by the absorbed energy, then release the energy back out. Sometimes it’s released up toward space. Sometimes it strikes another molecule. And sometimes it heads back toward Earth.

The Senate unanimously confirmed Deanne Criswell as the new administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Thursday. Criswell is the first woman to lead the agency, and she takes the helm at a critical time, with climate change intensifying the pace and severity of natural disasters.

Criswell, formerly New York City’s emergency management commissioner, was confirmed by unanimous consent shortly after the first day of Biden’s climate summit wrapped up, a fitting cap to a day spent discussing environmental crises and the challenges ahead.

The vote came three months into Biden’s term, underscoring the number of high-level administration positions yet to be filled after a slow start to the process that has recently made up ground.

FEMA is responsible for helping states respond to natural disasters. But in recent months, it has also set up mass coronavirus vaccination sites and has helped care for migrant teens and children arriving at the southern border.

At her hearing last month, Criswell said FEMA will play a crucial role in helping Americans face climate disasters, like last year’s record-breaking hurricane season and the recent run of devastating wildfires in the West.

“As FEMA responds to the covid-19 pandemic, it must also support communities in preparing for future challenges, in adapting to a changing world,” Criswell said.

Biden’s top domestic climate adviser, Gina McCarthy, hailed the start of the climate summit as a success, even as only a handful of other countries joined the United States on Thursday with new pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“The expectation today was that the United States would put a strong nationally determined contribution on the table so that we would have an ability to gather people together again and say, ‘The United States is back,’” McCarthy said, speaking in front of a pair of electric vehicle charging stations at Union Station in Washington with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. “That’s what we did.”

“We’re not at all disappointed,” she added, emphasizing that the White House event this week is just a prelude to a United Nations climate conference in Scotland this fall. “We got the leaders to come together, even if it was on Zoom. We actually had a lot of countries that stepped up to the plate. We expect a lot more.”

To kick off Thursday’s summit, Biden committed the United States to cutting its climate-warming emissions by as much as 52 percent by the end of this decade. Japan and Canada also ratcheted up their commitments, while other countries, such as China, only reiterated previously stated targets.

McCarthy also defended the administration’s decision not to set a specific deadline for ending sales of new gasoline-powered cars or achieving net-zero emissions from the transportation sector.

“We’re not making any promises,” McCarthy said, adding that “we have a whole lot of ways” to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in half from 2005 levels by 2030 without setting a specific goal for the transportation sector.

Acknowledging that the transportation sector is the nation’s biggest contributor to climate change, Buttigieg said, “I can’t think of a better way to mark this Earth Day than by discussing the future of electric vehicles.”

Former vice president Al Gore said Xi Jinping’s statements at the climate summit Thursday represented progress and a positive step for the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter.

In a Washington Post Live interview, Gore applauded the Chinese president for saying that his country would curb its construction of coal-fired power plants, a leading source of carbon dioxide in China. But, Gore said, “the language needs specificity.”

China announced last year that it would reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2060, and Xi reiterated that pledge Thursday.

Gore said China has “a history of planning their work and then working their plan.” The former vice president predicted that the country will “overachieve” on its goal, which would be crucial in the global battle against climate change.

In the interview, Gore did not note that China stood apart from some other countries by not using the summit as a platform to announce new, more ambitious pledges.

Broadly, he called the summit “heartening and important” and said that “we are seeing the whole world crossing the political tipping point on climate right now, right this second.”

Gore praised Biden’s approach to the climate crisis and said it is part of the “strongest start in these first 100 days of any president” since President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The Transportation Department announced Thursday that it will withdraw its part of a Trump administration rule blocking states from setting their own tailpipe standards, which could help pave the way for a broader climate deal with the nation’s automakers.

The proposed rule, which will be subject to 30 days of public comment once it is published in the Federal Register, will no longer bar individual states such as California from establishing their own greenhouse gas emissions standards and zero-emissions vehicle mandates. Early next week the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to reverse a related Trump-era policy by moving to restore the Clean Air Act waiver the agency gave California in 2009.

The administration’s actions will give the liberal state more leverage in discussions between the auto industry and federal and state officials over national mileage and greenhouse gas emission standards for cars and SUVs. Thirteen states and the District of Columbia have signed onto California’s tailpipe emission standards: Collectively they represent nearly 40 percent of the U.S. auto market.

John F. Kerry said a future president won’t be able to undo the strides the Biden administration makes on climate change because the private sector is also invested.

“No politician in the future is going to undo this, because all over the world, trillions of dollars, trillions of yen, trillions of euros are going to be heading into this new marketplace,” Kerry said.

Kerry pointed to Tesla and other automakers that are committed to manufacturing only electric cars in the near future as an example of how industries are taking the lead before any government policy is put in place.

“Because the world as a whole is moving in this direction, because these companies have made this critical long-term strategic marketing judgment — and that is the way the markets are moving — no politician, no matter how demagogic or how potent and capable they are, is going to be able to change what that market is doing because it will have moved,” he said.