Coalition to boost climate efforts moves ahead without US

BAKU, Azerbaijan — The European Union teamed up with 11 countries Thursday in announcing a commitment to “ambitious” new climate plans — but the U.S., an architect of the initiative, did not join them.

Each of the governments said they would soon set new targets to cut greenhouse gas pollution by 2035 that are aligned with stopping the climate from warming more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Besides the EU, the coalition included Canada, Mexico, the U.K. and Norway. POLITICO reported last week that the United States had dropped its participation in the coalition, an action that appeared to reflect the new political realities in Washington given Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election.

Senior U.S. climate adviser John Podesta said the Biden administration welcomed the leadership displayed by the countries in the coalition, but did not respond to a question about why the United States was not included.

“We continue to work with countries to set ambitious climate targets with rapid emissions reductions that are required to secure a safer, cleaner planet for ourselves and our children,” Podesta said in an email to POLITICO, adding that the U.S. is “hard at work” to set its own 2035 target.

Asked at a press conference on Thursday why the U.S. was not part of the coalition, EU climate chief Wopke Hoekstra said: “There is a larger group of countries looking into joining us. … Having said that, we would really plead particularly with the largest economies and those emitting the most to do something that is similar to what we’re doing.”

Setting a new round of pollution targets is a key requirement for all countries signed onto the Paris Agreement on climate change, a 2015 pact that Trump has said he will leave.

Those goals “will be the final barricade for every nation in its fight-to-the-death against climate impacts getting more brutal each year,” U.N. climate chief Simon Stiell said in a speech that was unrelated to Thursday’s announcement.

Joining the pledge, Mexico’s secretary of environment and natural resources, Alicia Bárcena, lauded the country’s “renewed commitment to ambitious climate action” under President Claudia Sheinbaum, a climate scientist.

Of the 12 backers of the initiative, one — the U.K. — has already submitted a new target, while four said that they had reached net-zero already. The governments that pledged to come up with new targets were Canada, Chile, Georgia, Mexico, Norway and Switzerland plus the European Union. Switzerland said it would do so by February.

The seven countries said they would ensure their upcoming climate plans included targets that covered all greenhouse gases and every sector of the economy. They also promised the targets would either be a straight line or steeper path between their emissions today and their ultimate goals to reach net zero by 2050 — or slightly later in the case of some of the developing countries.

The countries that claimed to have reached net zero emissions already, thanks to the forests that soak up the emissions from their small economies, are Bhutan, Madagascar, Panama and Suriname.

In a joint statement, their leaders called “on the rest of the world to rise to the occasion, match our ambition, and embrace transformational changes.”