He noted the ravages of the human-caused climate emergency on the African continent, including deadly drought in the Horn of Africa, floods that displaced over a million people in Nigeria, and the increasing potential for conflict between herders and farmers as herding routes are forced to change.

Biden also touted his own administration’s legislation, including the Infrastructure Act, which pays for 50,000 electric car chargers throughout the country and the building out of high density wires that will carry clean electricity to where it is needed.

As for his Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Biden said,

It includes less than I asked for, but a significant amount: $368 billion to support clean electric en- — clean electri- — electricity, everything from . . . offshore wind to — to distributed solar, zero-emission vehicles, and sustainable aviation fuels; more efficient electrified buildings; cleaner industrial processes and manufacturing; climate-smart agriculture and forestry; and more.

The president noted that the US Department of Energy estimates that the IRA will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by about 1 billion tons in 2030.

He pointed to new government investment in batteries and other green technologies, with its potential to spark a revolution in this field, with positive implications for the whole world.

Biden apologized to the audience for the Trump administration decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Accord, but recalled his establishment of the Major Economies Forum to promote the fight against climate change.

Biden was able to speak with authority to the annual international climate summit, where many countries have made insincere pledges over the years, because despite his slim margins in Congress and the Senate, he was able to pass major green energy legislation. China is still the leader in the turn to green energy, but at least now the U.S. is also poised to become a leader rather than a dead weight dragging the world down into a climate apocalypse.

Biden’s appearance at the summit came the same week as the draft Fifth Annual US National Climate Assessment (NCA) was released for public comment.

The authors of the NCA point out that the climate emergency endangers all the things Americans most love, threatening our homes, neighborhoods and loved ones.

The Assessment warns,

Since the 1970s, there has been a marked acceleration in the cause of climate change (human- caused greenhouse gas emissions) and its effects, including increasing temperatures (Figure 1.2), rising sea levels, melting ice, ocean warming and acidification, changing rainfall patterns, and shifts in timing of seasonal events. Human activities have increased the frequency and intensity of many extreme events, as well as the likelihood of sequential and concurrent extreme events. Many climate conditions and impacts being experienced today are unprecedented for thousands of years . . . These trends are projected to continue over the next decade even if greenhouse gas emissions fall substantially, leaving the country no choice but to adapt to a changing climate.

One danger the Assessment points to is compound climate events. That is, global heating has made droughts more common. But the very areas struck by drought are also more vulnerable to the outbreak of wildfires. People in some regions therefore do not face a single extreme-weather phenomenon caused by the climate emergency but rather multiple such events at once or serially. Not only are droughts often followed by massive and destructive wildfires but heat and drought can also trigger algal blooms in nearby bodies of water, causing mass die-offs of the marine life on which fishermen depend. The compound climate disaster in the US Northwest in the summer of 2021, the report says, “caused damages exceeding $36 billion.”

Low-income neighborhoods, with their typical lack of tree cover, suffer more from global heating than others, so that there is a class dimension to these problems.

In every region of the country the menace took a different guise. The Northeast and Midwest have faced debilitating floods. Warm air can carry more moisture, enhancing the chances of downpours that turn into floods. In the Southwest and West, droughts and wildfires have cost the country $291.1 billion in the past 40 years. Coastal regions have seen rising sea levels and flooding, and the invasion of fresh water aquifers by salty sea water. And we are only at the beginning of these serious climate change effects.

The Assessment foresees increased displacement of Americans by extreme weather, by heat, wildfires, drought and flood. Millions could be put on the road in this way. These extreme weather events will also disrupt agriculture and increase the number of Americans who are food insecure. They will disrupt infrastructure, causing loss of electricity or heating to millions of homes and businesses. They will imperil the economic growth that Americans have come to take for granted.

Biden’s international leadership on the climate challenge is welcome. He is only too well aware, however, that it is not only “those people over there” who are endangered by these dramatic changes, cause by our spewing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Americans will increasingly see profound challenges to their ways of life because of the human-made climate emergency. With Biden at the helm, at least we have a leader who understands the challenge, and can empathize with the victims, and will work toward resilience and remediation.

Ronald Reagan used to say that he sometimes wished for an invasion of aliens from outer space because it would unite the whole world, then deeply and dangerously divided between the US-led capitalist bloc and the Soviet Union-led Communist bloc against a common enemy. He remarked in a 1987 speech, ““Perhaps we need some outside universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.”

Ladies and gentlemen, we have our alien space invasion. It is the climate emergency, which is preventing invading sun rays that strike the earth from radiating back out into outer space, keeping their heat here. Halting carbon dioxide emissions would allow the oceans to absorb the extra CO2 now in the atmosphere, allowing the sun rays finally to say adieu to earth.

President Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry, said that US-China cooperation on climate was “the only way to get this job done.”

Xie Zhenhua, China’s chief climate negotiator, said that the two countries had pledged “enhanced climate action in the 2020s under the framework of the Paris agreement.”

The agreement is one of principle, and the two countries will have regular meetings to fill it out with concrete details.

Former Secretary of State Kerry has expressed concerns about China’s plans to cease growing its carbon emissions by 2030 (which means it is right now building new coal plants), saying that that target should be moved up.

On the other hand, China has reduced the percentage of its electricity that is generated from coal from 80% to 57% in the past decade and a half, with wind, water and hydro now providing 28% of China’s electricity (the US figure is only 20%). China put in 76 gigawatts of new wind capacity in 2020 alone. Total US wind power capacity is only 118 gigawatts.

The US and China have poor relations on a number of global issues and Washington has begun to see China not as just a rival but as a potential enemy. The Xi Jinping government in Beijing, in the meantime, seems at times on the verge of abandoning the long-held doctrine of harmonious development, picking fights with the Philippines and Japan over insignificant maritime real estate and throwing its weight around.

Because of the two countries’ slams at one another and their increasingly vocal rivalry on the world stage, some observers have warned of a new cold war. In my view that language makes no sense, since the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union had a different character entirely. China, unlike the old Soviet Union, seems relatively uninterested in spreading a socialist economic model, and it has tinkered with its own to allow for a huge capitalist sector. China, unlike the Soviet Union, is not surrounding itself with Communist neighbors and is not seeking to destabilize other countries or install pro-Beijing juntas.

The US-China competition is much more like European rivalries in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, as between France and Britain or Britain and Germany, where capitalist countries competed for entry into foreign markets on the most favorable terms and for diplomatic and military spheres of influence. Despite President Xi’s sabre rattling, China isn’t at the point where it has taken over other countries (as the US did most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan).

So it is heartening that, according to Churchill quoting Xie Zhenhua (China’s climate envoy), Beijing and Washington have held some 30 meetings since President Biden came into office to develop the new initiative. Mr. Kerry is certainly correct that this “is the only way to get this job done.” And perhaps this climate cooperation could be the basis for greater cooperation and less rancor between China and the US on a range of other issues.

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Bonus Video:

The Guardian: “US and China announce surprise climate agreement”

Those carping about Biden’s performance seem not to remember the past four years when the president of the United States was a fascistic clown who ludicrously denied that there was any such thing as global heating, calling it a Chinese hoax, and knee-capped green energy in the US with severe tariffs on imported solar panels, and maintained that wind turbines caused cancer.

If Trump had won or had succeeded in his coup, the US would be massively ramping up its carbon emissions, not seeking to cut them in half.

Biden is still trying to get $500 billion in green energy spending and incentives from Congress, which would be the most massive pro-climate legislation in American history.

Biden pulled no punches about the irresponsibility of the leader of the Republican Party:

“And I guess I shouldn’t apologize, but I do apologize for the fact the United States, in the last administration, pulled out of the Paris Accords and put us sort of behind the eight ball a little bit.”

As eminent climate scientist Michael E. Mann has argued, climate pessimism is the new denialism. We get positive change by being dogged but optimistic (that is a general life lesson, by the way; optimists have been found by psychologists to be more successful in life and in business than pessimists). Let’s be optimistic that Biden can get at least some of his agenda into place. The Ray Bradbury story about the butterfly effect works both ways. A small positive change now can also produce enormous alterations in our future, for the better.

It is true that Biden has been dealt a weak hand in Congress, but that is the fault of American voters who packed that body with Republican climate change-Denialists, none of whom is willing to vote for green legislation. And that includes figures from states with very substantial numbers of wind farms such as Iowa and Texas. That is, they are turning down subsidies for a key industry in their own states because they are being bribed to betray their constituents by Big Oil. That the corporate press manages to focus all the attention on Democratic Party negotiations without managing to mention that those negotiations would not be necessary if even one Republican in the Senate would step up and do the right thing is an astonishing dereliction of journalistic responsibility.

It is also true that the courts ruled that Biden has to allow some sorts of new oil exploration. Not his fault, but that of court judges who are trying to kill their grandchildren. Nevertheless, you see headlines in the for-profit press blaming Biden.

It is true that the Russian and Chinese leaders did not show up at COP26 and that India is moving its goalpost for concerted climate action to 2070, by which time it will be “game over” for avoiding some of the consequences of pouring billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the earth’s atmosphere annually. Also, none of these developments is Joe Biden’s fault. They are in some important part the fault of Donald Trump, who gave polluters license to pollute by pulling the US out of the Paris Climate Accord. Why should other countries sacrifice if America won’t?

We already know who the CEO of AT&T, ultimate owner of CNN, wants in the White House, since he built up the far, far right wing OAN channel. The only thing AT&T didn’t do was to broadcast it in German.

So since few other news outlets will do so, let us consider what Biden actually said.

Biden asserted that US leadership on the issue is back, after being AWOL for four years.

“As I said earlier today, we’ve set ambitious goals of reducing U.S. greenhouse gases emissions by 50 to 52 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. That’s a goal line with limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. But the math only works if every country does its part and those countries that don’t have the wherewithal get the kind of help they need.

Every major economy needs to enhance its Paris targets, in my view, to a level that will keep our goal within reach. And then — and then continue to raise our standards. Developing economies need to take meaningful mitigation adaptation actions as well, but they’re going to need help.”

So Biden set a very specific and attainable goal for the U.S. Personally, I think he will be a two-term president and it is not impossible that he will find the means to accomplish it. Public opinion is swinging against fossil fuels in the US, and Hertz just ordered 100,000 Teslas in a major market signal of what large companies think the near future of transportation is.

Biden continued, “Our success, in my view, hinges on our collective commitment to ramping up our momentum and strengthening our climate ambition, advancing concrete actions during this decade to keep the 1.5 degrees Celsius goal within our reach and be realistic.” Again, he is setting a specific goal.

Another such goal: “at the U.N. General Assembly, I announced our intention to work with our Congress to quadruple our climate financing by 2024, including support for adaptation.”

He announced a whole new green government program: “But, today, I’m announcing also the Presidential Emergency Plan for Adaptation and Resilience. And although I tried to re- — I try to — very hard to resist acronyms, they came up with that because — so they could say, “PREPARE.” (Laughs.) That’s what we’re calling it. But — but PREPARE will serve as a comprehensive framework to mobilize the U.S. government resources and expertise in support of climate adaptation efforts for more than a half a billion people worldwide.”

PREPARE isn’t just for the US, though you might remember that New Orleans and other US cities need help with adaptation to our new, soon-to-be subtropical climate. Biden is offering to help the Global South, which did the least to provoke global heating but will suffer the most:

“We’re going to invest in creating an early warning system and expanding clean energy; and build a WaterSMART infrastructure for drought, supporting sustainable forestry and agriculture; and helping nature to work to reduce the climate change drivers and impacts; and protecting critical infrastructure, enhancing resilience of vulnerable nations in the face of a wide range of climate impacts . . . we’re also launching a net-zero world initiative to help share the technical expertise of the United States — its world-class national laboratories — and the speed and support to transition of — for developing countries to energy systems that are affordable and reliable and clean.”

Biden underlined again that the energy transition is necessary to address the climate emergency, but it is also an opportunity to create millions of well-paying jobs and improve infrastructure in the US and around the world.

Not a word about wind turbines causing cancer or global heating being a Chinese myth.

Biden is the first president to take the climate emergency seriously as an emergency. He has many levers of power to begin turning the USS America around on this issue, and if he can get us headed in the right direction, that will have enormous downstream impacts on our future and the future of the globe.

—-

Bonus Video:

PBS: Biden addresses COP26

In a prerecorded interview with Iran International, which was supposed to be embargoed for another two months but was mysteriously put on YouTube, Zarif complained that he never had up-to-date information about Iran’s military posture because the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps froze him out. He complained that Iranian politics and diplomacy had been subordinated to the Guards Corps, for which he used the euphemism “battlefield.”

He said when a person was in his position, “You couldn’t say how many people [Iranians] were killed in Syria. You couldn’t say– Kerry had to inform me that Israel had struck you 200 times.”

“You didn’t know?”

“No.”

He went on to say that the Revolutionary Guards told Iraqi prime minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi 45 minutes before they hit the al-Ayn military base in Iraq, which houses US troops in early January, 2020, in retaliation for Donald Trump’s assassination of Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani. He only found out about it, he says, two hours later.

This, my friend, is known in literary circles as “hyperbole,” that is, exaggeration for effect. It is not plausible that the Iranian foreign minister knew less than The Washington Post about Iranian troop deaths in Syria. Nor is it plausible that The Sydney Morning Herald knew that Israeli was conducting air strikes against Iran and its allies in Syria with deadly effect, but Zarif, who can read the newspapers in English and gets security briefings, did not.

It is like the old vaudeville routine where the comedian begins, “It was so cold…” and the audience is trained to shout, “How cold was it?”

“It was so cold, I went to the deli just for the heartburn.”

How ignorant was I being kept of the realities in Syria by Soleimani?

I was so ignorant I had to hear from Kerry that Israel was striking Iranian targets in Syria.

Things that were public knowledge. Things that Juan Cole as a blogger knew and was reporting from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Zarif didn’t know these obvious things. That’s how much he was kept in the dark.

Sec. Kerry denies that he ever said any such thing, and of course he didn’t. Zarif wasn’t reporting a conversation. He was using Kerry as a prop in his hyberbolic story.

The same Republicans now crying for Kerry to step down were silent when Donald Trump really did leak classified information to a visiting Russian delegation, revealing that Israel had placed a spy inside ISIL.

The big story here is the magnitude of the civilian-military rift in Iran. Although we tend to see Iran as a theocracy, with the chief cleric in charge, Zarif intimates that it is closer to a military dictatorship.

BBC Monitoring quotes Zarif as complaining, that for General Soleimani, “the battlefield was always the priority… and diplomacy was sacrificed.” He added, vehemently, “If the objectives of the battlefield govern the country’s strategies, this would lead to manipulation… and the battlefield would govern everything.”

According to the Euronews transcript, Zarif complained, “I was never able to ask Gen. Soleimani, for example, to stop an operation for the moment so that we could make progress in the negotiations. Not that I did not want to — Gen. Soleimani did not accept. But he repeatedly asked me to pursue certain issues in the ongoing negotiations.”

So he was complaining about the inequality of power and information-sharing inside the Iranian government, with the Revolutionary Guards always the top dog and the foreign ministry subordinate.

He added, “For example, Gen. Soleimani used to say to me that now that you are negotiating with [Russian Foreign Minister] Lavrov, present this list of 1, 2, 3 and 4 in the negotiations, for example, and ask him. But the opposite was never possible.”

Zarif also complained that the Russians had tried to sabotage the 2015 nuclear deal at the last moment. “The Russians did not think that the nuclear deal would succeed, and in the last few weeks, when they saw that negotiations were coming to an end, they began to make new proposals. At this point, Russia and France proposed that Iran be required to renew its Security Council mandate every six months to continue the nuclear deal. In other words, Iran would have had to negotiate every six months with five permanent members and 10 non-permanent members of the council in order to extend the deal in the UN Security Council, which we never accepted.”

The leaked interview has roiled Iranian politics, with hard liners demanding that Zarif resign while others defended him, saying his comments were not meant to be public. One parliamentarian darkly intimated that whoever leaked the audio intended to derail indirect US negotiations with Iran at Vienna over a mutual restoration of the 2015 nuclear deal.

Iran International: Zarif Interview File