NewsUSABiden draws a red line to defend his climate measures even if he loses Congress

Biden draws a red line to defend his climate measures even if he loses Congress

The last fire that broke out for Joe Biden in the final stretch of the legislative elections had to do with coal. He gave the example of the closure of a thermal power plant in Massachusetts whose production had been replaced by wind energy. “We are going to close these plants throughout America and have wind and solar power,” he said at a speech in Carlsbad, California. Right away, Joe Manchin, the fractious Democratic senator from West Virginia, called the proposal “offensive and disgusting.” “Comments like these are the reason the American people are losing confidence in President Biden,” he snapped in a statement.

White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre tried to put out the fire by simultaneously defending the energy transition and supporting mining communities and recalling that Biden’s own grandfather was a mining engineer. But the scuffle exposes some of the contradictions about clean energy, climate change and the energy transition plaguing the United States.

Biden himself is the subject of these contradictions. He has promoted the Inflation Reduction Law, which is above all a law to support clean energy, which aims to mobilize 370,000 million in ten years to encourage renewables and has assured that he will maintain climate measures even if he loses control of Congress. But at the same time, he keeps asking oil companies to use their billion-dollar windfall profits to invest in more exploration and production at a time when production has skyrocketed and oil and gas exports are breaking records.

The president has marked the return of the United States to the path of international cooperation against climate change from which Donald Trump separated him. The former president mocks electric cars at his rallies and unapologetically defends fossil fuels.

Biden, on the other hand, s to the objectives of the Paris Agreements and appears at COP27 with the Inflation Reduction Law as a guarantee of his commitment to renewables and a package of new measures under his arm. The President will deliver a special address on our efforts to build on the unprecedented work of the United States to reduce emissions and advance the global climate fight and help the most vulnerable build resilience to climate impacts. of your government. “The Biden Administration is proud to come to this COP with historic momentum. We have seen the United States go from a global laggard to a world leader in less than 18 months,” he adds.

A hostile majority

The Inflation Reduction Law still encounters bureaucratic, legal and operational obstacles to the deployment of its effects, but it is the most ambitious initiative of the United States against climate change. This year, his government has suffered a setback by the Supreme Court, which has undermined the power of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to impose limits on emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. greenhouse that contribute to global warming.

Now, although the final results are still up in the air, he faces the prospect of losing control of Congress, in which the Republicans are favorites to win a majority in the House of Representatives. He already struggled to push through his climate law with a Democratic majority (Senator Manchin was precisely one of those who resisted the most), and now he will probably find a majority hostile to energy transition measures.

Biden, however, has drawn a red line precisely on this issue: “I am not going to walk away from the historic commitments we have just made to address the climate crisis. For me they are not issues that can be compromised and I will not allow it, ”he said this Wednesday at the White House at the press conference in which he commented on the election results. The president stressed that the young people had voted for this policy. “I have the veto pen,” he added at another point in reference to his ability to block laws he doesn’t share.

new announcements

The president of the United States arrives at COP27 with a package of new initiatives under his arm. According to the White House, he will propose bolstering global climate resilience, including doubling the US commitment to the Adaptation Fund to $100 million and announcing more than $150 million in new aid to accelerate Emergency Plan efforts. President’s Program for Adaptation and Resilience (PREPARE) across Africa.

He will also advocate accelerating global climate action, including launching a new initiative to support Egypt in deploying 10GW of new wind and solar power, while decommissioning 5GW of inefficient natural gas generation, and tightening regulations. proposed national regulations on methane in the oil and gas sector that would reduce US methane by 87%. “The announcement of new measures that would make the United States the first national government to require major suppliers to set emission reduction targets consistent with the Paris Agreement, leveraging the government’s more than $630 billion annual purchasing power Federal,” says the White House.

Another of his proposals will be to use public financing to unlock billions of private investment, such as the “Climate Finance +” initiative, which will support developing countries in the issuance of green bonds; launching the Sustainable Banking Alliance to deepen sustainable financial markets in developing countries; and making strategic investments to help mobilize billions in private finance and facilitate the export of clean technologies from the United States. Finally, it will put on the table a Climate Gender Equity Fund, a Mechanism for Access to Financing for Indigenous Peoples and other initiatives to involve the whole of society in the fight against the climate crisis.

It is not clear that at the summit in Egypt they will willingly buy the speech. Biden is the only president of the large emitting countries present at COP27, which is not attended by the top leaders of China, Russia and India. And he may become a target of criticism for not compensating for his historical emissions bill (something that he would be impossible to sell on Capitol Hill) and for not fulfilling commitments to contribute funds to cooperate with poor countries in the energy transition. “The president has committed to working with Congress to increase international climate financing from the United States to more than 11,000 million dollars per year, which would make him the single actor that would contribute the most to climate financing,” they maintain in the White House. But if Biden has not managed to get Congress to give free rein to those funds with a Democratic majority, even less will he achieve it without it.

The White House assures that Biden is on the right track to achieve the goals of reducing by 2030 emissions between 50% and 52% below 2005 levels and zero emissions by 2050, through his new laws and measurements. “These measures will not only reduce emissions, but also increase energy security, help families save money on their energy bills, create good-paying jobs for workers and spur a new era of clean American manufacturing, boost the environmental justice and will favor that the communities have healthier air and cleaner water”, he maintains.

The newspaper New York Times asked Climate Interactive in 2017 to estimate when Americans would have run out of fossil fuel if the nation’s population had somehow been allocated, at the start of the industrial age, an equal share of the rest of the population. world population. “The calculation was based on limiting emissions enough to meet international climate targets. The answer: the Americans would have exhausted their quota in 1944, the year the Allied armies stormed the Normandy beaches.

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