US rejoins Paris climate accord with warning: this year’s talks are ‘last, best hope’
The US has marked its return to the Paris agreement by urging countries to do more to confront the climate crisis, with America’s climate envoy, John Kerry, warning that international talks this year are the “last, best hope” of avoiding catastrophic global heating.
On Friday, the US officially returned to the Paris climate accord, 107 days after it left at the behest of former president Donald Trump. Joe Biden moved to reverse this on his first day in office and Kerry conceded that the US is returning “with a lot of humility, for the agony of the last four years”.
“This is a significant day, a day that never had to happen,” Kerry said to Al Gore, the former US vice-president, in a conversation filmed on the eve of the re-entry. “It’s so sad that our previous president without any scientific basis or any legitimate economic rationale decided to pull America out. It hurt us and it hurt the world.”
The contrition of the Biden administration is, however, balanced by a desire to resume the mantle of leadership at a time when almost every country is struggling to undertake the swift emissions cuts required to avert disastrous global heating of 1.5C above the pre-industrial era, as outlined in the Paris deal.
Kerry said that none of the world’s major emitters, including China, India and the EU, are doing enough and that key UN climate talks later this year in Glasgow, Scotland, provide the “last, best hope we have” to get the world on track to avoid runaway climate change.
“The meeting in Glasgow rises in its importance,” said Kerry, a former US secretary of state. “We are at this most critical moment where we have the capacity to define the decade of the 20s which will make or break us to get to net zero carbon in 2050.” Kerry said that countries will have to “define in real terms their roadmap for the next 10 years, the next 30 years. We are talking about a reality we haven’t been able to assemble in these meetings so far.”
Kerry said that coal use needs to be phased out far more quickly, coupled with a rapid escalation of electric vehicles and renewable energy, and that he hoped to “build some new coalitions and approach this in a new way”. The US climate envoy said he had reached out to the pro-fossil fuel leaderships in Brazil and Australia, which have “had some differences with us, we’ve not been able to get on the same page completely”.
“For the last four years there were a lot of times when a lot of us thought the failure of this enterprise may rest on one word: Trump,” Kerry said in an event on Friday to mark the Paris re-entry. “But the international climate regime is still standing.”
While emissions worldwide from factories, airplanes and cars dipped sharply last year due to pandemic-related lockdowns, there are already signs of a roaring comeback that risks blowing past the agreed temperature limits and unleash worsening heatwaves, flooding, storms and societal unrest. The narrowing window of time to avoid climate breakdown means there is only brief cheering over the return of the US, the world’s second largest emitter of greenhouse gases.
“It’s good to have the US back in the Paris agreement, but sadly we have no time to celebrate,” said Laurence Tubiana, France’s climate change ambassador and a key architect of the Paris agreement. “The climate crisis is deepening and this is the year we need all major polluters to step up and deliver stronger plans to deliver a safe, clean and prosperous future for everyone.”
The US will release a new emissions cut pledge ahead of a 22 April summit convened by Biden with other major emitting countries and Tubiana said this goal should be “at least” a 50% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2030, from 2005 levels. The US, under Barack Obama, promised a 26% cut by 2025 and got about halfway to this target before the Covid-19 outbreak.
A coalition of nearly 200 environmental and humanitarian groups have urged the Biden administration to move well beyond the largely symbolic act of rejoining the Paris agreement by contributing billions of dollars to help defend poorer countries vulnerable to climate impacts and “lead with actions rather than just words”.
“The climate crisis is a race against time, and the US is just reaching the starting line after years of inaction,” said Jean Su, energy justice director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “As the world’s largest historical polluter, the United States must take its fair share of robust climate action on both the domestic and global stage.”
HAMBURG – Nord Stream 2, the almost-finished pipeline running directly from Russia to Germany, is not really about securing cheap natural gas. It is about personal gain and these two countries’ national interest.
The pipeline across the Baltic has pitted the United States and the European Union against Germany, and a swelling chorus of domestic critics against Chancellor Angela Merkel. If it were just a matter of gas molecules, the project might never have seen the light of day. So, why did it?
Go back to 2005, when Gerhard Schröder and Russian President Vladimir Putin sealed the deal just before Schröder stepped down as chancellor. Shortly after handing power over to Merkel, the Russian energy giant Gazprom, essentially a Kremlin affiliate, named Schröder chairman of Nord Stream AG’s shareholders committee. In 2016, Schröder rose to the top of Nord Stream 2, with Gazprom the only shareholder.
Ever since, Schröder has been Putin’s tireless point man. Schöder never tires of repeating that he did it for the good of Germany, because it locked in energy security at decent prices.
In fact, Germany and Western Europe do not need Nord Stream 2. The oil price has more than halved since its 2008 peak. And with ever more new gas fields coming onstream, especially in the Mediterranean, not to mention North America, the price of gas has dropped by almost four-fifths over this period. Nor is the gas glut likely to be temporary, given ever more renewables surging into the market.
There are already 13 pipelines running from Russia to Europe, delivering some 250 billion cubic meters (m3) of gas. Nord Stream 2 will raise dependence on Russia, but much more is at stake, because the pipeline circumvents Ukraine and Poland. For Putin, Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, rightfully belongs to the rodina, the Motherland, and he has already grabbed two pieces: Crimea and the Donbas. Likewise, he believes that Poland, a former satrapy, should be part of Russia’s sphere of influence.
Nord Stream 2 enables Putin to weaken both countries by depriving them of transit fees and breaking Ukraine’s grip on the tap. In 2020, Ukraine earned $3 billion in fees from transporting some 50 billion m3 of gas. Nord Stream 2 could pump about the same amount of gas – a neat coincidence. Schröder’s Gazprom gambit would enable Putin to apply the screws to Ukraine (and Poland), at a time when the government in Kyiv is desperately trying to resist Russian pressure on Ukraine’s already-weak economy.
Schröder was not really thinking of Germany or Europe when he got his friend Putin to top up his modest chancellor’s pension of €93,000 ($113,000) per year. The real puzzle is Merkel. When former US President Donald Trump told her, “You’ve got to stop buying gas from Putin,” she did not budge. An unnamed German official vowed: “We will do anything it takes to complete this pipeline.”
Presumably, energy supplies are not uppermost in Merkel’s mind. This is not about the “low politics” of gas and cash, but the “high politics” of states seeking power and position. Regardless of how often Germans and Russians have been at each other’s throats, the enduring reflex goes back to Bismarck, who famously told the country in the middle: “Never cut the link to St. Petersburg.” In other words, keep the peace with the giant on Germany’s eastern flank.
Though now sheltered by NATO, the Federal Republic has been honoring Bismarck by practicing propitiation, or at least benevolent neutrality. With her fine sense for power, Merkel is not swooning over Russian gas, but sticking to a classic rule of German diplomacy.
Even during the Cold War, West Germany defied three American presidents – Nixon, Carter, and Reagan – by bartering steel pipes for Soviet energy. But what might have made economic sense during the global oil shocks of the 1970s now reflects only Bismarck’s admonition: Don’t rile the Russians.
Today, however, Merkel is acting on a new stage, and not only because of oversupply and dwindling demand as the industrial world shifts to solar, wind, and higher efficiency. Suddenly, Merkel is “home alone.” It is not just the US, Britain, and nervous East Europeans who want to reduce Nord Stream 2 to scrap. Even the French are turning against the deal.
Reliant on nuclear power, France doesn’t need Russian gas. It worries more about Germany’s “special relationship” and Russia’s lengthening shadow over Europe. Just this month, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov threatened to rupture relations with the EU if it imposed new sanctions.
In addition, Merkel faces unprecedented headwinds on her own turf. Even prominent fellow Christian Democrats and the pacifist-minded Greens have turned against Putin. So have parts of the liberal media, which usually zeroes in on imperial America.
Why? Two words: Alexei Navalny. Facing his most dangerous rival yet, Putin has overplayed his hand. The Kremlin’s attempted murder of Navalny, and now the longish prison sentence meted out to him, has rattled Germany’s political class. In democracies, moral revulsion beats Merkel-style realpolitik.
The wheeling and dealing has already begun. Germany is dangling some juicy carrots before Biden, promising to raise subsidies for the construction of German liquefied natural gas terminals that will take in American LNG. Germany also vows to work hard on new rules that would ensure the continued transit of gas through Ukraine. Poland will get funds for LNG terminals. There is talk that Germany would shut off Nord Stream 2 if Russia violated international law and human rights. Please, President Biden, just lift the sanctions.
A deal will be struck. But who will “negotiate” with the energy market? The court of supply and demand may issue this definitive verdict: no need for another pipeline. If so, Nord Stream 2 may just rot away underneath the Baltic – a monument to greed and folly.