Scientist Michael Mann argued that the United States should “go well beyond those Paris commitments,” as President Joe Biden rejoined the Paris climate agreement on Friday.
“We need to review the commitments now if we are to stay on track to avoid catastrophic 3 degrees Fahrenheit warming,” said Mann, author of “The New Climate War,” during a Friday night interview on CNBC’s “The News with Shepard. Smith. “We have to step up our commitments and the other countries of the world have to do it.”
The move to rejoin 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 agreement. He formally notified the United Nations in 2019 and the US exited the Paris Agreement the following year after a wait. Mann explained that during that time the United States “lost four years of opportunities to tackle the greatest challenge we face.”
Joel Rubin, a former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Obama-Biden administration, told “The News with Shepard Smith” that there is now a higher bar for America’s return to the global climate struggle.
“The world has outpaced America’s climate leadership and will be skeptical of our commitment to staying engaged,” said the national security expert who worked on both climate change policies and renewable energy programs in governments. Clinton and Bush. “This has always been the albatross surrounding America’s role in multilateral climate diplomacy – a lack of strong legal backing for it.”
Domestically, the Texas crisis has shown just how fragile electricity grids can be during extreme weather, which experts warn could get worse due to climate change. Homeland Security Advisor Liz Sherwood-Randall even underlined the danger of climate change during a press conference in the White House on Thursday.
“The extreme weather events we are experiencing this week in the central, southern and now eastern United States are showing us once again that climate change is real and that it is happening now, and we are not adequately prepared for it,” Sherwood-Randall said.
Mann explained that climate change could be a contributing factor to Texas fear of freezing temperatures.
“There is some evidence that climate change can lead to an increase in incidents of these types of events, but there is no doubt that if we look together at all the extreme weather events we have seen in recent years, unprecedented heat waves and droughts and forest fires and superstorms, we can see the fingerprint of the human impact on our climate during 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 isn’t happening more often.
“Not only would this send a strong signal to the world that we are taking it seriously, it would finally break the Gordian knot that has undermined America’s credibility on the world stage when it comes to fighting climate change,” said Rubin. “That is a necessary political battle. It will be cruel, but the alternative of not having it is much worse.”