Joe Biden has invited Russian president Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping to the first major climate talks of his presidency, a signal that the United States is willing to put the climate crisis above even its most strained international relations.
President Biden is hosting the virtual talks, which will be live-streamed to the public, around Earth Day on April 22 and 23.
The US hopes the event will spark more ambitious targets in reducing global emissions which are rapidly heating the planet and bringing extreme and unpredictable events.
The US is also expected to announce a much-tougher 2030 emissions target after the federal government spent the past four years virtually absent on the issue under the leadership of Donald Trump.
The president was asked about the invites to Mr Putin and Mr Xi on Friday, and replied, “they know they’re invited. But I haven’t spoken to either one of them yet”. He added that he had just gotten off a call with British PM Boris Johnson.
The event will be a revival of a forum of the world’s major economies on climate that George W. Bush and Barack Obama both used and Mr Trump let languish.
It will also be a very public test of whether America is truly back at the helm on this issue, and if President Biden in particular, can still drive global decision-making after the Trump administration shook up longstanding alliances.
Since taking office in January, Mr Biden has ramped up climate action, rejoining the Paris Agreement and taking steps to shift the US economy away from its reliance on fossil fuels. He also announced that he would be convening a leaders summit on the climate crisis.
Leaders of some of the world’s top climate-change sufferers, do-gooders and backsliders round out the rest of the 40 invitations being delivered on Friday. The climate summit is being viewed as a key event this year ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP26, this November in Glasgow.
Climate scientists warn that global heating needs to be kept well below 2C, above pre-industrial levels, with an aim for the increasingly ambitious 1.5C, to avoid the worst of climate breakdown.
The Leaders Summit and COP26 are both aimed at catalyzing efforts that keep that 1.5C goal within reach, the White House said.
The Biden administration intentionally looked beyond its international partners for the talks, an administration official said.
“It’s a list of the key players and it’s about having some of the tough conversations and the important conversations,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AP.
“Given how important … this issue is to the entire world, we have to be willing to talk about it and we have to be willing to talk about it at the high levels.”
