By Elishya Perera
Brussels, Belgium (CU)_United States Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry travelled to Brussels on Tuesday (9 March) to relaunch Washington’s cooperation with European officials on climate action.
US President Joe Biden, as well as EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, have said that fighting global warming is among their highest priorities. This was reiterated when the US President signed an executive order to re-join the United States for the Paris climate accords, just hours after his inauguration on 20 January.
Kerry was welcomed on Tuesday by the EU Commission vice-president in charge of climate action, Frans Timmermans, and the parties held discussions focusing on the next UN climate summit, which is scheduled to be held in Glasgow in November. He also participated in a weekly commission meeting on trans-Atlantic climate action, during which he met with von der Leyen and other EU officials.
“We face an extraordinary crisis, because the science is screaming at us, the evidence grows by the year,” Kerry said. “Last year, again, hottest year in history. … So, this is a crisis, the climate crisis. But it’s also a moment of the greatest opportunity that we’ve had since perhaps the industrial revolution.”
The Paris climate accord is an agreement between nearly 200 nations, to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change, by keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
In December last year, EU leaders reached a deal to cut the bloc’s net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55 per cent by 2030 compared with 1990 levels. The Biden administration, however, is yet to announce the United States’ new national 2030 target for cutting fossil fuel emissions.
“We have no better partners than our friends here in Europe and the EU, it is important for us to align ourselves now, which is what we will discuss today, because no one country can resolve this crisis,” Kerry said. “It will take every country.”
He added that the Paris agreement alone would not get the job done. “The scientists tell us: This decade, 2020 to 2030, must be the decade of action.”
