How does Biden plan to deal with climate change?
(January 2021 video) 1:47
(CNN) -
US President Joe Biden will announce an ambitious cut in carbon emissions on Thursday as he seeks to put the country back at the center of the global effort to address the climate crisis and curb carbon emissions.
Biden is chairing a climate summit that will be attended by 40 other world leaders.
At the White House summit, which will take place virtually this Thursday and Friday, Biden will commit the United States to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions between 50% and 52% below its 2005 emission levels by 2030 Officials said Biden and his team reached this goal in a meeting at the White House Wednesday morning.
The figures were obtained after lengthy consultations with government agencies, scientists, industry representatives, governors, mayors, and environmental researchers.
The move underscores the president's commitment to addressing the climate crisis and continues his commitment to working with other countries to find joint solutions to global problems.
When then-President Barack Obama first joined the Paris climate accord in 2015, he pledged to reduce emissions in a range of 26% to 28% by 2025, making this new reduction target of between 50%. and 52% is a big jump.
A second official said the higher target would give the United States "significant leverage" to convince other countries to raise their ambitions ahead of a climate summit in Glasgow later this year.
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It is not clear how the plan to reduce emissions will be carried out
What the president will not reveal, at least now, is a specific roadmap for how the United States will achieve those goals, which are described as "economically."
Officials described "multiple avenues" for the United States to reach the goal, saying the president's climate working group would publish sector-by-sector recommendations later this year to achieve the necessary cuts.
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"Achieving that goal is something we can do in multiple ways," said a senior administration official a day before the announcement.
"In the coming months, you will continue to see the administration focus on driving the necessary actions that unlock the job opportunity presented by addressing the climate crisis," said the senior administration official.
Several members of Biden's cabinet will play a role at the summit, including holding sessions, speaking at sessions and discussing how their role, department or agency relates to issues related to the climate crisis, said an independent administration official. earlier this week.
The summit will focus on mobilizing financing from the public and private sectors to achieve net zero emissions and "build a resilient future," according to the official.
The United States plans to discuss investing in innovation, which the administration says is critical to creating transformative technologies to reduce emissions while creating new economic opportunities.
Other countries are expected to follow the United States' lead with additional announcements of new targets to address the crisis, the administration official said.
“There is a significant sign that we expect action at this meeting.
We are looking for people to make announcements, to raise their ambition, to indicate the next steps they intend to take to help solve the climate problem, "said the official.
saying.
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The climate summit, a change of course for the US
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping are two notable leaders who have confirmed their attendance at the summit, underscoring the wide range of leaders who attended.
The summit will also be attended by many US allies, including Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
The summit departs radically from how the climate has been addressed over the past four years under former President Donald Trump.
The former president repeatedly denied the scientific reality of the climate crisis and his administration systematically pushed back environmental policies.
Trump withdrew from the Paris deal, but Biden administration officials said work to cut carbon emissions continued anyway at the state and local levels, preventing the United States from losing too much ground.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the United Nations, told "The Ax Files with David Axelrod" that although Trump was rolling back environmental policies for the past four years, "our private sector did not turn back the clock and State governments did not back down, and the American people at large did not back down. "
"It is incumbent upon us to continue to build on what we are doing over these four years to make it more difficult for a different administration to change things so quickly," Thomas-Greenfield told Axelrod, who is a senior political commentator for CNN.
Since taking office in January, Biden has elevated climate change as an essential element of US foreign policy and national security.
The United States re-entered the Paris climate agreement, the landmark international agreement signed in 2015 to limit global warming, from which Trump pulled the United States.
Biden appointed former Secretary of State John Kerry as his special presidential envoy for climate, a cabinet-level position that is part of the National Security Council.
The president also appointed Gina McCarthy, former director of the Environmental Protection Agency, as his White House climate czar to head his newly formed Office of National Climate Policy.
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Climate is a major focus of the president's roughly $ 2 trillion infrastructure proposal.
He said his proposal would create hundreds of thousands of jobs while tackling the climate crisis, reducing emissions and building a "modern, resilient and completely clean network."
Biden is expected to focus heavily on the potential economic benefit that the fight against climate change could bring.
Its critics have described attempts to move the country away from fossil fuels as destroying jobs.
But Biden hopes to highlight the opportunities that would come along with overhauling the technology to make it cleaner.
"There is only one manual that works at the moment and that manual is to pursue the economic opportunity presented by addressing the climate crisis and we are doing it," said the senior government official.
The officials said they carried out a "technical-economic" analysis in various sectors, including electricity, transportation, buildings, industry, land and oceans, to identify various ways to reduce emissions in each.
That included the potential for new standards and incentives that would limit greenhouse gases.
"The 2030 goal is a goal that we believe we can meet," said the senior administration official.
As a presidential candidate, Biden presented a plan to end carbon emissions from power plants by 2035 and proposed broader public investment in green infrastructure, including $ 2 trillion for clean energy projects.
- CNN's Kaitlan Collins contributed to this report.
Climate change carbon footprint
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