2h ago
09:18
Biden to focus on environmental agenda today with
press briefing and executive orders
Joe Biden
will address the nation about the climate crisis later today, and sign further
executive orders aimed at environmental impacts. Those directives include
spelling out how US intelligence, defense and homeland security agencies should
address the security threats posed by worsening droughts, floods and other
natural disasters under global warming. Biden’s appearance is due at 1:30pm EST
(6:30pm GMT).
Before
that, White House press secretary Jen Psaki will also hold an event, joined by
climate envoy John Kerry and White House national climate advisor Gina
McCarthy.
Kerry has
already been laying the ground for today’s environmental announcements since
taking up his role. Ellen Knickmeyer writes for the Associated Press that he
has been trying to make clear that the US isn’t just revving up its own efforts
to reduce oil, gas and coal pollution but that it intends to push everyone in
the world to do more, too.
Kerry’s
diplomatic efforts match the fast pace of domestic climate directives by the
week-old Biden administration, which created the job Kerry now holds.
At 77,
Kerry is working to make a success out of the global climate accord that he
helped negotiate in Paris as president Barack Obama’s secretary of state and
that he then saw rejected by president Donald Trump
Success for
Kerry is hardly assured. At home, he faces pushback from the oil and gas
industry and loud Republican concerns that jobs will be lost.
Internationally,
there’s uncertainty about whether Biden’s climate commitments can survive the
United States’ intensely divided politics, let alone the next presidential
transition. Meanwhile, environmentalists are pushing Kerry to be more
aggressive – demonstrating outside his house on his first full day on the job.
Already
Kerry has spoken virtually with US mayors, foreign presidents and premiers,
government ministers and others. His message is: put your big one-off Covid
economic recovery funding into projects that boost cleaner energy. Get green
projects going fast in Republican-leaning U.S. states to prove renewable energy
can mean jobs and build needed political support. Get everyone to talk to China
about things like stopping the building of dirty-burning coal-fired power
plants.
If China
and the US, as the world’s No. 1 and 2 top carbon emitters, don’t spell out exactly
how they will curb climate-damaging emissions more quickly, “we’re all going to
lose credibility,” Kerry told an online gathering of American mayors last
weekend.
The US has
to have the “credibility to go to the table, show people what we’re doing and
push them to do more,” Kerry said then. “So everybody can can understand it’s
not fake, it’s not a phony, empty promise it really is getting real. They’re
not going to believe it when we just say it. We have to do it.”
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