President Biden Must Discard U.S. Hubris at COP 26
WASHINGTON, D.C. – As Congress grapples with the Build Back Better Act and infrastructure legislation, today President Biden is attending the United Nations climate summit, known as COP 26, in Glasgow, Scotland.
Karen Orenstein, Director of the Climate & Energy Justice Program at Friends of the Earth U.S., issued the following statement in response:
We know that the Build Back Better Act represents the most ambitious U.S. climate policy to date. While its climate provisions might seem ambitious for Washington, we also know that the legislation is both wholly inadequate for limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C and deeply unjust for BIPOC and low-wealth communities in the United States and billions of people living in the Global South.
President Biden is challenged by conservatives in Congress who torpedoed measures to limit fossil fuel production and a legislature beholden to fossil fuel companies. But even before the Build Back Better saga, the U.S. Nationally Determined Contribution that President Biden released in April was deeply at odds with the United States’ “fair share” of global greenhouse gas emission reductions given its status as the world’s largest economy and largest historical carbon polluter. The U.S. is also woefully out of step when it comes to the provision of climate finance for developing countries, which are already paying the price for an unfathomably costly climate crisis that is not of their own making.
At COP 26 in Glasgow, President Biden should discard the falsehood that the U.S. is a global climate leader and must not pretend it is the job of the U.S. to get other major emitters to do more. President Biden must get the U.S. to do much more to fight climate change and stop pointing fingers at other countries.
Communications contact: Brittany Miller, (202) 222-0746, [email protected]