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Top Biden officials hope the new goal will help rally climate action at the state and local level.
With one foot out the door, U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday announced a new climate goal for the United States that aims for sharper reductions in the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, countries are required to submit nonbinding climate targets every five years—known as nationally determined contributions, or NDCs—and ratchet up their ambitions as they do so. Ahead of the next deadline in February 2025, uncertainty had swirled over how the Biden administration would act given President-elect Donald Trump’s imminent return. Trump has dismissed climate change as a “hoax” and is widely expected to scrap existing climate policies and once again withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement.
Biden’s new goal is a parting shot from an administration that has made tackling climate change a key focus—even if his successor is all but certain to ignore the target.
The administration’s latest pledge calls on the United States to slash its greenhouse gas emissions by 61 to 66 percent below 2005 levels by 2035 as well as to cut methane emissions by at least 35 percent. In 2021, Biden set a target of cutting emissions by at least 50 percent by 2030.
The new 2035 goal is “a much more aggressive statement of what needs to occur, and it needs to occur rapidly,” said Alice Hill, who served as a special assistant to President Barack Obama and senior director for resilience policy on his National Security Council. “It is a signal that time is running away from us. It’s also a signal that although we’ve made great progress, we need to make a lot more,” added Hill, who is now at the Council on Foreign Relations.
However, Trump’s dismissal of climate change raises questions about whether the pledge will quickly be rendered meaningless.
Top Biden administration officials expressed optimism that the target could help rally climate action at the state and local level. “While the United States federal government under President Trump may put climate action on the back burner, the work to contain climate change is going to continue in the United States with commitment and passion and belief,” Biden’s top climate diplomat, John Podesta, said in a press call on Wednesday.
“We’re looking to governors, mayors, business leaders, and more to carry this important work forward, because the rest of the world will now be looking to them to show how many Americans still care about the future of our planet and our communities,” he added.
But after witnessing one U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, countries are left in a bind. They can’t count on the United States, yet there is no credible solution to the climate crisis—let alone a just one—without one of the world’s largest emitters at the table.
If the United States does manage to meet its new 2035 target, it will be on a straight path to net-zero emissions by 2050, according to the administration. Climate scientists have shown that countries need to hit that deadline to have a chance of keeping the global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Beyond that threshold, the world will face more catastrophic climate impacts.
However, not everyone agrees that the new U.S. target is sufficient. Other experts suggest that U.S. emissions reductions would have to be steeper to achieve that 2050 deadline. Modeling from the Natural Resources Defense Council found that a straight line path would require a 67 percent reduction. Taking into account equity factors—essentially that the United States has the largest cumulative carbon footprint and the largest bank account—the Climate Equity Reference Project suggests that the U.S. target should be 70 percent, coupled with support for significant emissions reductions in developing countries.
But, again, the current U.S. political reality is not exactly conducive to meeting the target the Biden administration has put forward, let alone a more ambitious target. Trump is expected to revoke some of the key tax credits that Biden put in place to incentivize consumers and businesses to embrace the clean energy transition.
The changing political winds may have factored into the White House’s final decision. When asked in the press call if the administration had revised down the target after the election, a senior official said it was a “dynamic exercise.”
Looking ahead to the Trump era, Podesta and National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi pointed to businesses and state governments as the key to continuing to drive down emissions in the face of a hostile administration. New modeling after the U.S. presidential election from the University of Maryland’s Center for Global Sustainability found that such nonfederal actions could add up to 54 to 62 percent emissions reductions by 2035—results that a senior administration official said “are reinforcing of the theory we’ve laid out here.”
But states will have to stretch to meet that goal. Even now, after significant policy action over the past four years, the United States isn’t on track to meet the 2030 target Biden set in 2021, according to analysis from Rhodium Group.
The Biden administration’s announcement comes on the heels of this year’s U.N. climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan—known as COP29—which offered a glimpse into how global climate diplomacy may unfold in the coming years as Washington turns increasingly inward.
In international forums such as COP and on the global stage more broadly, the policy about-face between Biden’s and Trump’s climate policies has dealt a blow to Washington’s image, experts said.
“Countries are watching what we do,” said Hill, the former Obama official. “The flipping and the flopping hurt [and] undermine the credibility of the United States internationally.”
But Biden’s latest statement also “sends a signal that the United States—as it wavers on its course—has, at least in some administrations, a goal that’s consistent with what other nations have said they’re trying to achieve,” she added.
The move was welcomed by European Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra, who said in a post on X that the next year must now be used to “intensify climate diplomacy and arrive at #COP30 with the right ambition to keep climate change under control and support the growth of our clean tech industries.”
In a recent FP Live episode, Podesta told FP’s Ravi Agrawal that he has sought to communicate to international partners that Washington “would continue to decarbonize even in the face of an administration whose favorite slogan is ‘drill, baby, drill.’”
“As I’ve traveled around the world, I’ve told people that our direction is firm. Power that’s going to be produced in this country is going to be clean,” Podesta said. “There’s no turning back on this. The question is the pace.”
At COP29, Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, and the United Kingdom made waves in pushing for more robust action, with Brasilia, London, and the United Arab Emirates all announcing more aggressive NDC targets at the summit. The European Union has also made strides and has ambitions of becoming climate neutral by 2050, although shifting political headwinds will likely also complicate that outlook. And in Japan, lawmakers are weighing proposals that would set more aggressive targets to slash the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.
For China, the world’s largest emitter by far, the U.S. target is unlikely to move the needle. Yao Zhe, a global policy advisor at Greenpeace East Asia, said the Biden’s administration’s parting announcement wouldn’t “have the power to motivate China. China will just make its own decisions, independent of what’s in the U.S. NDC.” The primary challenge China faces is “to balance the future potential of its green economy and the current economic difficulties China is dealing with,” she said. Chinese officials have said the country will submit a target covering all greenhouse gases by the February deadline, but experts have suggested that it may fall well short of the 1.5-degree pathway.
Targets aside, as Washington again abdicates its role on the global stage under a second Trump administration, one big question is whether Beijing will move to fill the vacuum. After Trump announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement in 2017, China made headlines by continuing to back the agreement, and Chinese officials have signaled that their commitment will stand the test of another Trump withdrawal.
“A big unknown is what China will do,” Hill said. “This is an opportunity for China to show global leadership in the absence of U.S. leadership.”
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The post What America’s New Climate Targets Mean for the World appeared first on Energy News Beat.
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