The US should “go effectively past the Paris commitments” to avert world warming

Scientist Michael Mann argued that the United States “must go well beyond these Paris commitments” when President Joe Biden rejoined the Paris Agreement on Friday.

“We need to tighten commitments now to stay on track to avert catastrophic warming of three degrees Fahrenheit,” said Mann, author of The New Climate War, during an interview Friday night on CNBC’s The News with Shepard Smith. “We have to increase our commitment and the other countries in the world have to do that.”

The move to resume the Paris Climate Agreement was a departure from the Trump administration’s climate policy. In 2017, former President Donald Trump announced his intention to withdraw from the deal. He officially notified the United Nations in 2019, and the US left the Paris Agreement the following year after waiting. Mann stated that during this period, the United States “lost four years of opportunity to face the greatest challenge we face”.

Joel Rubin, former deputy assistant secretary of state for the Obama-Biden administration, told The News with Shepard Smith that there is now a higher bar for America’s return to climate change on the world stage.

“The world has moved away from American leadership on climate change and will be skeptical of our commitment to remain committed,” said the national security expert, who has been involved in both climate and renewable energy programs in the Clinton and Bush administrations has worked. “This has always been the albatross of America’s role in multilateral climate diplomacy – a lack of strong legislative support for it.”

Domestically, the Texas crisis has shown how vulnerable power grids can be in extreme weather conditions that experts warn could worsen due to climate change. Homeland Security Advisor Liz Sherwood-Randall even underlined the threat of climate change at a press conference in the White House on Thursday.

“The extreme weather events we are witnessing this week in the central, southern and now eastern United States show us once again that climate change is real and is happening now and we are not adequately prepared for it.” “Said Sherwood-Randall.

Mann said climate change could be a contributing factor to freezing temperatures in Texas.

“There is some evidence that climate change could lead to an increase in incidents of these types of events, but there is no question that when we look together at all of the extreme weather events we have seen in recent years, unprecedented Heat rules waves and droughts and forest fires and super storms, we can see the fingerprint of the human impact on our climate in these devastating events, “said Mann.

Rubin said Biden’s next job is to pass legislation to make a meaningful change in reducing America’s carbon footprint. So what happened in Texas doesn’t happen more often.

“Not only would this be a strong signal to the world that we mean business, it would finally break the Gordian knot that has undermined America’s credibility on the global stage in the fight against climate change,” said Rubin. “This is a necessary political struggle. It will be brutal, but the alternative of not having it is much worse.”