The United States has committed to cutting its emissions at least in half from 2005 levels by 2030, a move that could require replacing virtually all petrol-powered cars and trucks with cleaner electric vehicles charged largely by low-carbon power sources such as sun, wind, or nuclear plants.
“The signs are unmistakable, the science is undeniable and the cost of inaction keeps mounting,” US President Joe Biden said in a speech at the summit where he invited 40 world leaders including Nigeria.
Biden said that America “has resolved to take action” on climate change and called on world leaders to significantly accelerate their own plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or risk a disastrous collective failure to stop catastrophic climate change.
“The countries that take decisive actions now” to tackle climate change, Biden said, “will be the ones that reap the clean energy benefits of the boom that’s coming”.
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Joining Biden on Thursday, President Xi Jinping of China restated promises his nation already has made to “strive to peak” emissions by the end of this decade and reach carbon neutrality by 2060.
Xi noted that China’s goals call for “extraordinary efforts” and maintained it is cutting emissions “in a much shorter time span than what might take many developed countries”.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said as part of measures to fight climate change, his country is installing 450 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity by 2030. Modi said his country’s per capita emissions are far smaller than other major emitters.
The summit is the first of its kind to be convened by a United States president, coming barely months after the end of the former President Trump administration marked by climate denial and pulling the country out of the Paris Agreement.
The other world leaders in attendance, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, also made commitments.
Trudeau pledged Canada would reduce its greenhouse emissions levels 40 percent-45 percent from 2005 levels by 2030, compared with its previous target of a 30 percent emissions reduction in the same timeframe.
Japan also announced that it would cut emissions 46 percent below 2013 levels by the end of the decade, a significant show of solidarity with the United States.
Biden’s target of 50 percent-52 percent by the end of the decade calls for a steep and rapid decline of fossil fuel use in virtually every sector of the American economy and could start an internal political fight in the country.
Americans still buy about 17 million fossil-fuel burning vehicles each year which could still be around for the next 20 years.
Even then, these cars and hundreds of others are exported to poorer countries, including Mexico and Nigeria, where they last many years due to repeated repairs. In 2019, the country earned over $50 billion exporting cars.
Cutting emissions from transportation, which accounts for nearly one-third of America’s greenhouse gas emissions, will be a difficult, painstaking task.
The two-day summit comes at a time when scientists are warning that governments must take decisive action to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees above pre industrial levels.
The consequences of exceeding that threshold include mass species extinctions, water shortages and extreme weather events that will be most devastating to the poorest countries least responsible for causing global warming.
Officially, nations that are party to the Paris agreement are obligated to announce their new targets for emissions cuts in time for a United Nations conference in Scotland in November.
