Biden’s climate summit is all about the green
Behind the loud rhetoric and noble promises, climate policy for all world leaders is about one thing … money.
More than anything else, Joe Biden’s much-hyped virtual climate change summit has demonstrated the enduring currency of American exceptionalism and confirmed the power of money.
Biden succeeded where other efforts to bring world leaders to the table, including by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, had largely failed.
The US got the world’s attention partly by pledging to double its decarbonisation effort to 2030, but mostly by agreeing to reopen its wallet.
Despite a global roadshow by Biden’s climate change envoy John Kerry, pledges by other nations to do more were limited and confined to America’s key strategic allies the European Union and Britain, Canada, Japan and South Korea.
Like the US, Japan has pledged to curb emissions by 46 per cent by 2030 compared with 2013 levels, up from 26 per cent.
South Korea said it would stop supporting coal-fired power plants overseas, although President Moon Jae-in stopped short of cancelling projects already approved. The country will submit an enhanced climate target for 2030 within the year.
Canada promised to cut emissions by 40-45 per cent but, in a lesson for other leaders, this was widely criticised by climate groups as not high enough.
Neither China nor India made any new commitments.
China, the world’s biggest emissions nation, confirmed that it would continue to grow coal consumption until the middle of the decade and that consumption would only decrease after that.
Chinese President Xi Jinping reiterated his country will continue with its current pledge which allows it to increase greenhouse gas emissions until 2030 but then strive to be carbon neutral by 2060.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi repeated his country’s pledge to expand its fleet of renewable energy projects, urged people to make lifestyle changes to address climate change but left no doubt that India is sticking with coal to bring its vast population out of poverty.
President Vladimir Putin of Russia, the world’s fourth-biggest emitter, promised to keep emissions below those of the EU. This is not much of a promise given that Russia’s greenhouse gas emissions are around half of the total of the 27 EU countries, which combined have more than three times the population of Russia.
The difficulty with climate change diplomacy is that every nation has its own interests, which are enshrined in the Paris agreement divide between developed and developing nations.
The US commands attention because it is expected to be the major source of international funding. At the virtual summit, which featured 40 heads of state, Biden said the US intended to double, by 2024, its annual public climate finance to developing countries to an estimated $US15bn ($19.4bn) a year.
There are a lot of hands out for that money.
Turkey is still arguing to be reclassified as a developing country for the Paris agreement so that it can receive climate finance. It says it will not ratify the Paris agreement until this is done.
Mexico saw the Biden conference as a way to plead for greater migration rights for its citizens. Mexico has a program to pay farmers to plant trees, but investigations have shown farmers can cut trees down in order to be paid to plant them again. Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador wants the US to give these same farmers visas to work and live in the US.
Argentina is calling for a “debt for nature swap”, under which national debt can be cancelled in exchange for tree planting and other environmental measures.
South African president Cyril Ramaphosa argues that climate financing should be separated from general aid and given as grants not debt.
Meanwhile, Indonesia says it is serious about climate change action, even though analysis by Energy Policy Tracker shows that since the start of the pandemic the government has spent $US6.76bn on supporting fossil fuels and less than $US240m on clean energy.
Australia, by contrast, has spent just $US867m ($US34 per capita) supporting fossil fuel energy and $US2.06bn ($US81.26 per person) supporting green energy. The US, mostly under Donald Trump, spent $US72bn ($US220 per person) supporting fossil fuel energy and just $US27bn ($US83 per person) on green energy.
The figures underscore Australia’s position that it is more interested in what countries are doing than what they say they are going to do. In his short address to the Biden conference, Scott Morrison said: “We are well on the way to meet and beat our Paris commitments and will update our long-term emissions reduction strategy for Glasgow.
“Achieving our 2030 target will see emissions per capita fall by almost half, and our emissions per unit of GDP by 70 per cent.
“Already we have reduced our emissions by 19 per cent on 2019 — on 2005 levels I should say, more than most other similar economies — and by 36 per cent when you exclude exports. We are deploying renewable energy 10 times faster than the global average per person. We have the highest uptake of rooftop solar in the world.”
Environment groups have accused Morrison of “bluffing his way through the summit”.
“It’s a bit rich of the Prime Minister to say future generations will thank us not for what we have promised, but what we deliver, when his government has neither promised nor delivered real climate action,” said Australian Conservation Foundation chief executive Kelly O’Shanassy.
Despite the harsh words from climate activist groups, Australia is unlikely to suffer internationally because of its approach, in the short term at least.
For all the declarations of intent at the summit, the emissions figures speak for themselves. The International Energy Agency says global CO2 emissions will rise by the second-biggest amount in history this year as the global economy recovers from COVID-19.
Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have breached a significant threshold of a 50 per cent increase on pre-industrial era levels. But it would be a mistake to think the Biden summit has not pushed the needle on global climate action.
By boosting its ambition for 2030, the US has refocused attention away from pledges to be carbon neutral by 2050 to where it needs to be to force governments to be genuine in setting a credible pathway for decarbonisation.
The addresses by world leaders were only the first part of the two-day virtual Biden conference. Much of the rest of the program was devoted to climate finance, renewable energy and union jobs.
“No nation can solve this crisis on our own,” Biden said. “All of us, and particularly those of us that represent the world’s largest economies, we have to step up.”
For Biden, the climate agenda is about more than combating climate change and is why his policies still might face a tough time in congress. Since taking office in January, his administration has made little progress on emissions-reduction target legislation.
A White House statement ahead of the conference said climate change posed an existential threat, but responding to this threat offered an opportunity to support good-paying union jobs, strengthen America’s working communities, protect public health, and advance environmental justice.
Australia’s Investor Group on Climate Change chief executive Emma Herd says the new US emissions reduction target for 2030 is an enormous market signal to global capital markets.
“There are trillions of dollars in private capital that investors are looking to commit to the transition to net-zero emissions,” Herd says. “Nations that are not keeping pace with the comparative global benchmark for ambition will be at an increasing competitive disadvantage in global capital markets.”
Which ever way you look, it is all about the money.
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