‘There are no jobs on a dead planet’, Sharan Burrow tells Biden’s summit

Sharan Burrow, the former Australian union leader who is now general secretary of International Confederation of Trade Unions, has told US President Joe Biden’s that, “there are no jobs on a dead planet” as she committed the union movement to supporting climate change action coupled with support for workers in industries affected by transition.

Sharan Burrow in Melbourne in 2019.Credit: Wayne Taylor

The second day of the summit addressed economic opportunities and heard from a range of political and private sector speakers including Bill Gates and the US climate envoy, John Kerry, as well as President Biden, who called for a “fourth industrial revolution”.

Commitments to take action by Japan, Canada, the European Union and the United Kingdom among others “mean that half of the world’s economy is now committed to the pace of actions that we need — at a pace we need — to limit warming to 1.5 degrees,” President Biden said.

Though President Vladimir Putin committed Russia to working to extract carbon from the atmosphere, US media noted that the summit attracted no new firm commitments from Russia, Australia, India, Indonesia and Mexico.

Away from the summit, the Chinese Foreign Minister demonstrated the difficulties the Biden administration faces in working with the country most crucial to lowering global greenhouse gas emissions.

The minister, Wang Yi, warned that Chinese co-operation would depend on how the United States responded to President Xi Jinping’s policies regarding Hong Kong, Taiwan and Xinjiang Province.

“Our two countries still have many differences, but still, President Xi attended the climate summit convened by President Biden. So, that is an action taken by China at the top level to work with the United States on climate change,” Wang said at a virtual event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations.

“If the United States no longer interferes in China’s internal affairs, then we can have even smoother cooperation that can bring more benefits to both countries and the rest of the world.”

The United States is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in history; China is currently the largest emitter.

The Biden administration this week pledged to roughly halve its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 — an ambitious goal that is slightly below the target enshrined in law by the European Union and significantly below that of Britain.

China, which argues that its industrialisation began much later than in the West, is still increasing its emissions; it has said it will hit peak emissions by 2030 and draw them down to net zero by 2060.

China’s emissions stem largely from burning coal, the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel. The country is, by far, the world’s top coal consumer, and it is building new coal plants at home and abroad, even as the United States and Europe have begun to retire their coal fleets.

Xi said at the summit that China would “strictly limit” coal projects in the immediate future and “phase down” coal after 2025.

Republicans in the United States criticised the administration because China had not announced new emissions reductions targets.

In an interview Friday after the White House summit, the US climate envoy, John Kerry, dismissed that criticism. He said he was optimistic that Beijing would raise its climate ambitions before the crucial climate negotiations sponsored by the United Nations in Glasgow, Scotland, in November and that he hoped China would announce a suspension of its funding for coal projects beyond its borders.

“We made a first step with China,” Mr Kerry said. “Now we continue the diplomacy. We’ve got to go deal with China.”

Jennifer Hillman, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said she saw the Chinese president’s participation at the summit as a promising sign. The comments by China’s foreign minister the following day were sobering, though, with Wang laying down what sounded like conditions expected in exchange for cooperation with the United States on climate change.

“Today was more a realistic picture,” Hillman said. “What I heard from Wang Yi is that there are a lot of prerequisites for this cooperation that are going to be very difficult.”

The current targets are nowhere near what’s sufficient to avert the worst effects of warming. The Biden administration’s announcement of $1.2 billion for the Green Climate Fund, which is designed to help poor countries address climate change, was seen by many as a drop in the bucket.

With The New York Times

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