“Together, we must prepare for a long-term strategic competition with China (Communist Party of China),” President Joe Biden said Feb. 19 while participating in a video conference in Munich.
The U.S. government officially rejoined the Paris climate agreement on Friday (Feb. 19), exactly 30 days after President Joe Biden signed more than 10 executive orders, including rejoining the global climate agreement, on his first day in office on Jan. 20.
“We must quickly accelerate our commitment to be proactive in curbing our emissions,” Biden said on Friday while attending the Munich Online Security Conference.
Biden’s move reverses the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. Trump has argued that the climate agreement’s content is a “total disaster” for the U.S. economy, while it is too lenient on greenhouse gas emissions for communist China.
Biden repeatedly pledged to rejoin the Paris climate agreement during the 2020 campaign, promising to achieve net zero emissions for the United States by 2050.
In remarks delivered Friday at the White House, Biden said, “Together, we need to invest in the technological innovations that will power our clean energy future and enable us to develop clean energy solutions for the global marketplace.”
The 2015 Paris climate agreement aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit the planet’s temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius this century, while working to further limit it to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
To achieve this long-term goal, countries should “strive to reach a peak in global greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible and achieve a climate-neutral world by mid-century,” the UN said.
U.N. Secretary-General Guterres told the media a day before the U.S. formally returned to the agreement that the U.S. decision to join “strengthens global action” in mitigating the effects of global climate change.
“President Biden’s net-zero emissions pledge means that two-thirds of the countries that produce today’s global carbon pollution are seeking to be carbon neutral (meaning climate-neutral) by 2050,” Guterres said.
The United States made a commitment in the Paris agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 26-28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, a goal it will not achieve on its current trajectory.
Biden has pledged to take strong action to meet these goals. Former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who helped negotiate the Paris Agreement in 2015 as Biden’s presidential envoy on climate matters, was also a member of the National Security Council.
Kerry also joined U.N. Secretary-General Guterres at an event Friday to celebrate the U.S. return to the Paris Agreement.
Biden also announced Friday that his administration will host the Earth Day Leaders Climate Summit on April 22 as part of the Biden Administration‘s climate diplomacy. He said the summit aims to push emitters, including the United States, to come up with more ambitious climate action.
Republicans, however, are opposed to emissions reductions that do not take reality into account.
Former President Trump had said in 2017, when announcing his decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, that it “is the latest example of an agreement that Washington has joined that works against the United States, leaving other countries to reap the benefits exclusively, allowing American workers and taxpayers to absorb the costs in the form of lost jobs, lower wages, closed factories and a dramatic reduction in economic production. “
The Trump Administration officially announced its withdrawal from the agreement in 2019.
Many officials also believe that rejoining the global pact as it stands now would have devastating economic consequences for the U.S., with minimal actual environmental benefits.
Sen. John Barrasso, the ranking Republican on the Senate Energy panel, criticized Biden’s move to rejoin the climate agreement in a tweet.
“Returning to the Paris climate agreement will raise energy costs for Americans while failing to address climate change. The Biden administration is setting unworkable goals for the U.S. while allowing China (Communist Party of China) and Russia to do business as usual.” He wrote.
Nicolas Loris, deputy director of the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation, said the Paris climate agreement will take a heavy toll on U.S. households and businesses.
“It will be very expensive for American households and businesses because 80 percent of our energy needs are met through carbon-emitting conventional fuels,” Loris told. “Regulating them and subsidizing alternatives will hurt American families and taxpayers.”
“Because the Paris Climate Agreement has no real power, (meaning) developing countries get a free pass on emissions,” he said, “the Paris Agreement is likely to fall short of its intended goals.”
Loris cautioned that the agreement may end up delivering neither economic gains nor real climate gains globally.
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