President Joe Biden pledged to cut U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions in half by 2030 at a virtual climate summit Thursday, outlining an aggressive agenda that would require sweeping changes to America’s energy and transportation sectors.
The White House also said it would double its climate-related financing for developing countries by 2024 and push the private sector to fund sustainable infrastructure, mitigation initiatives, and other investments.
“These steps will set America on a path of a net-zero emissions economy by no later than 2050,” Biden said as the White House opened the two-day summit, attended by 40 leaders from around the world. “Scientists tell us that this is the decisive decade, this is the decade we must make decisions that will avoid the worst consequences of a climate crisis,” Biden claims.
The White House’s goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 50-52 percent from 2005 levels is nearly double the reduction target set by the Obama administration in 2015, yet the details of how it will be achieved are still undisclosed.
The policy aimed at drastic reduction of greenhouse gases will be formalized in a document called a “Nationally Determined Contribution,” or NDC. The NDC is a public commitment to address climate change made by each country that signed on to the 2015 Paris Agreement, which the United States formally left at the behest of then-President Donald Trump and reentered this year after Biden took office.
Biden administration officials say the target, one of the most aggressive in the world, is achievable despite the transformation of the fossil fuel-dependent economy it would entail.
Today, closing the summit, Biden voiced his belief that addressing climate change would create “millions of of good paying jobs around the world in innovative sectors.” How many of these jobs will be filled by Americans he did not specify. He said he has directed the Energy Department to “speed the development of critical technologies to tackle the climate crisis.” Today, the agency announced $109.5 million in funding for “projects that directly support job creation in communities impacted by changes in the energy economy.” But this is unlikely to really help the workers whose jobs are lost due to implementation of a new “green economy.” The United Mine Workers of America President Cecil Roberts said that many of the jobs the Biden administration said would replace coal-mining jobs wouldn’t actually pay the same salary a coal miner would take home.
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Biden’s enthusiasm is not shared on the other side of the political aisle, either. Republicans vowed to fight his proposals to shift the U.S. energy sector away from coal and other fossil fuels in favor of renewable energy.
Senator John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) slammed Biden’s 50-percent emissions reduction plan, saying it would put the country at a competitive disadvantage globally.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Thursday that Biden’s agenda for the virtual climate summit “reportedly is to encourage them to expand their country’s Paris climate agreement commitments to meet even more ambitious emissions goals.” He added, “The problem … is the hollowed commitments the countries made back in 2015 carry no serious means for enforcement. Many of the signatories within the supposed deal have largely ignored their stated commitments and continue to emit with reckless abandon.”
Indeed, despite the fiery pledges made by the international leaders to cut emissions, the climate goals have only been met by a few countries. Nearly every nation that signed on to the Paris Climate Accord continues to violate the agreement. According to 2018 statement from Climate Action Network Europe, “All EU countries are failing to increase their climate action in line with the Paris Agreement goal.” All but five countries have even reached 50 percent of their current targets.
China — the world’s biggest polluter — boasts it would make its electricity generation carbon free by 2035, and reach complete carbon neutrality by 2050. In reality, it is only increasing its emissions. President Xi has long argued that, as a developing economy, China should not have to share the same burden of curbing emissions as developed nations whose pollution went unchecked for decades. Currently, China’s level of air pollution surpasses pre-COVID levels. China is the only country for which greenhouse-gas pollution increased during the previous year. On top of that, China is building more coal plants than all of Europe has combined.
India, which is expected to surpass China as the most populous country in the world by 2027, intends to make major leaps in its development in the coming decades. Achieving such leaps will require considerably more energy than India currently consumes. India is now the planet’s third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide, with emissions set to rise.
During the summit, despite Biden’s energetic attempts to engage the attendees, both China and India held back on making concrete commitments to fight climate change and declined to set new emissions-reduction goals.
Meanwhile, despite Biden’s promises of new good-paying jobs, Americans are losing their jobs. On day one of his presidency, Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, leaving as many as 11,000 people out of work. Then he signed an executive order halting oil and gas leasing on public lands, which will cost America an estimated one million jobs. Now, “Keep it in the Ground” activists are calling on Biden to shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline, which has been safely operating for more than three and a half years — delivering up to 570,000 barrels of North Dakota crude oil per day to U.S. markets.
Unfortunately, it seems the president is paying homage to vocal far-left environmental groups rather than the millions of blue-collar union workers and working-class families. In his obsession to “out-compete China,” which actually increases its emissions, Biden is dragging the United States into a meaningless and expensive “climate change” race that the United States cannot win with the strategy proposed by his administration, and should not even get involved in to begin with.
