At G-20, deals struck on climate and taxes, but skeptics doubt their reach

President Biden, in his news conference wrapping up the G-20 summit, asserted that the United States is reclaiming its global leadership role despite the turbulence of American politics and the uncertainty about where the country is headed.

In response to a question about why the world should believe America is back, Biden cited his warm reception from other leaders at the summit. “Because of the way they reacted,” Biden said. “They sought me out, they wanted to know what our views were. And we helped lead what would happen here.”

The president added, “The United States of America is the most critical part of this entire agenda.”

Biden was also asked about his decreasing poll numbers, saying polls rise and fall for every president and adding that he did not run to notch high approval ratings.

“I ran to make sure that I followed through on what I said I would do as president of the United States,” Biden said. “And I said that I would make sure that we were in a position where we dealt with climate change, where we moved in a direction that would significantly improve the prospects of American workers to have good jobs and good pay. And further, that I would make sure that we dealt with the crisis that was caused by covid. We’ve done all of those, we continue to do them, and we’ll see what happens.”

And he attributed the complaints of some advocates that the summit’s accomplishments were minimal to the failure of Russia and China to participate more fully.

“The disappointment relates to the fact that Russia and China basically didn’t show up in terms of any commitments to deal with climate change,” Biden said. “There’s a reason why people should be disappointed in that — I found it disappointing myself.”

U.N. Secretary General António Guterres signaled on Twitter that he was underwhelmed by what the world’s wealthy nations have agreed to do on climate.

As the G-20 wrapped up, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi said it had succeeded in reestablishing a multilateral system that had been broken in recent years, as leaders reached agreements aimed at fighting climate change and easing vaccine inequities.

“We have a common ambition now, which we didn’t have before,” Draghi said.

But he also made it clear that many of the pledges on the climate — the focus of Sunday’s meetings — still need to be backed up by concrete action. Climate change activists are skeptical that will happen, given how the world’s industrialized countries, which emit the most greenhouse gases, are far behind the pace necessary to avert disaster.

“It’s easy to suggest difficult things,” Draghi said. “It’s very very difficult to actually execute them.”

The G-20 leaders set at least a few clear climate targets. Notably, they agreed to stop funding coal plants abroad by the end of the year. They also acknowledged the need to hit net-zero emissions “by or around mid-century” and affirmed the need to provide annual funding of $100 billion to poorer countries most vulnerable to climate change.

Many experts on climate policy said the agreement does break some modest ground. Countries clearly stated their desire to reach the more ambitious of the two targets laid out in the Paris climate accords, limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, rather than 2 degrees.

But those experts also said the agreement lacked the substance necessary to follow through on that goal.

Claire Fyson, who co-heads the policy team at Climate Analytics in Berlin, called the deal “the bare minimum.”

As the COP26 climate summit opens in Glasgow, smaller countries are watching the G-20 closely, hoping the major emitters set a tone that could jump-start the international climate talks.

“The feeling I get — all eyes are on the G-20,” Fyson said. “If they don’t move fast enough, the rest of the world can’t compensate for that.”

ROME — Biden, saying global supply chains must be improved, pledged Sunday to provide additional funding and improved management of mineral stockpiles to ease problems with production and moving goods to market.

“Supply chain is something that most of our citizens never think twice about unless something goes wrong,” he said in remarks at the G-20 summit. “And during this pandemic, we’ve seen delays and backlogs of goods.”

Slowdowns in supply chains have led to massive delays of goods moving internationally and threaten to slow the economic recovery from the pandemic, both globally and in the United States. The problems have caused huge increases in shipping costs, fueling inflation — which, in turn, could become a political problem for Biden and the Democratic Party.

Biden said he would sign an executive order Sunday giving the Pentagon the ability to more quickly release material from the National Defense Stockpile. He also announced an effort to cut the customs-related red tape that has delayed goods flowing through Southeast Asia. And he offered technical assistance to break bottlenecks that are slowing supply routes through Mexico and Central America.

“Now that we have seen how vulnerable these lines of global commerce can be, we cannot go back to business as usual,” Biden said.

The announcements were part of a “Summit on Global Supply Chain Resilience” that Biden convened with the European Union and other countries to focus on strengthening and diversifying global supply chains.

Governments can play a key role, Biden said, in anticipating and responding to shortages, ensuring supply chains are not relying on child labor and finding ways to reduce supply chains’ effect on climate change.

When the G-20 ends later Sunday, there will be one immediate benefit for local residents: Those living in the surrounding neighborhood, known as EUR, will get their normal lives back.

During the two-day summit, EUR has been a neighborhood transformed. Streets have been cut off. Many businesses have been closed. At one of the few open cafes, employees needed permission slips to come to work, and U.S. Secret Service members were among the clients.

“Most residents disappeared. I think they’re holed up in their homes, a bit scared by the event,” said Dario Rosa, the cafe’s owner. “People will ask me, ‘Aren’t you afraid?,’ and I tell them, ‘I think I’m in one of the most secure spots of the whole planet.’”

On Sunday morning in the deserted neighborhood, under a gray sky and military helicopters, a 4-year-old dressed as a witch was strolling hand-in-hand with her father, holding an empty plastic Halloween pumpkin basket. Entrepreneur Loris Talone, 52, and daughter Vittoria were the only civilians in sight on the street, which was populated by police, paramedics, journalists, and professional drivers idling as they awaited their passengers.

Talone and his daughter would soon be stepping out of the “Red Zone” surrounding the event. Talone said he and his family had spent all Saturday holed up at home, an experience he compared to the coronavirus lockdown, and were finally about to take Vittoria trick-or-treating in the city center.

Only there, in a more normal part of town, could she “play, celebrate, buy masks and makeup,” he said.

Leaders of the world’s largest economies reached an agreement Sunday to halt the public financing of coal-fired power plants abroad by the end of this year, but they did not set a target for ending coal use domestically.

The countries, as part of the deal, also pledged to “enhance where necessary” their national emissions-cutting plans for 2030. The United Nations has said those plans must be ramped up dramatically to stave off catastrophe.

The agreement noted that the dire effects of climate change would be significantly less if the globe’s temperature rose 1.5 degrees Celsius rather than 2 degrees, and noted the importance of limiting the rise to 1.5. The deal comes in advance of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow that begins Monday.

Although the deal triggered a roar or approval from negotiators when it was reached, it is certain to face immediate skepticism from scientists who say that the largest emitters still are not doing enough. Some experts — as well as Alok Sharma, the president of COP26 — had challenged G-20 countries to commit to consigning coal to history, calling its use “incompatible with a future that keeps [the goal of] 1.5 alive.”

The lack of a pledge to phase out domestic coal use could reflect the the interests of China and India, two major fossil fuel users. According to Our World in Data, both China and India get more than 50 percent of their energy from coal. The United States depends on coal for about 12 percent of its primary energy, and the figure is similar in Europe.

An official from one of the G-20 governments, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the agreement, said that it had the right intent — to limit warming to 1.5 degrees — but lacked the substance to make that goal more realistic. A series of scientific reports has made it clear that countries are already far behind the pace needed to reach the goals set out in the Paris climate accord.

Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, called the G-20 agreement “weak” and said it “simply failed to meet the moment.”

“If the G20 was a dress rehearsal for COP26, then world leaders fluffed their lines,” she said in a statement.

Alex Scott, who follows climate diplomacy for the energy think tank E3G, said the G-20 deal, though short on specifics, showed that rich countries are in consensus about the danger of failing to act. That contrasts with two years earlier, during a G-20 summit attended by former president Donald Trump in Japan, where one of the main tension points was whether the leaders would even address the subject of climate.

This year’s G-20 agreement “doesn’t provide the timeline or specifics,” Scott said. “However, it does set leaders up with an expectation that they’ll come to the Glasgow COP and put some meat on the bones.”

ROME — Standing outside the Salone delle Fontane Friday morning, French finance minister Bruno Le Maire proclaimed the dawn of a new age for international taxation — one in which governments would band together to stop multinational corporation from driving tax rates ever lower.

“It is clearly a revolution in the international taxation system,” Le Maire said, speaking to reporters shortly before a meeting between President Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron. Implementation of the measure will “be at the core of the French [European Union] presidency,” which starts next year, Le Maire said.

But beneath the public professions of cooperation at the “Group of 20” meetings, doubts persist over the lingering divisions between nations that could undermine the pact’s effectiveness and scope.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has made the new minimum tax on corporations among the top priorities of her tenure, aiming to reverse a decades-long decline in the amount of revenue governments are raising from large firms and crackdown on tax havens. She has called the effort essential to funding government services like health care and public infrastructure, both in the U.S. and abroad.

Failure to arrest the decline in corporate taxation, Yellen has warned, could starve governments of badly needed revenue while allowing the power of large multinational firms to grow dangerously unchecked.

President Biden spoke to reporters alongside European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, addressing a deal with European Union officials his administration announced on Saturday. Biden said the U.S. and E.U. are “ushering in a new era of cooperation.” He did not take questions.