Back in Paris pact, US faces tougher climate steps ahead

Back in Paris pact, US faces tougher climate steps ahead

SeattlePI.com

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World leaders welcomed the United States' official return to the Paris climate accord Friday, but politically trickier steps lie just ahead for President Joe Biden, including setting a tough national target in coming months for cutting damaging fossil fuel emissions.

And even as Biden noted the country's first day back in the climate pact, the globe's dangerous warming was just one of a long list of urgent problems Biden raised in a video speech to European leaders on Friday, a month into his administration. Before bringing up climate issues, he touched on the global pandemic, sputtering national economies and tense relations with China, among other matters.

“We can no longer delay or do the bare minimum to address climate change,” Biden said in remarks to the Munich security conference. “This is a global existential crisis, and all of us will suffer if we fail."

Biden signed an executive order on his first day in office reversing the pullout ordered by President Donald Trump. The action fulfilled a Biden campaign pledge. Trump said soon after he took office that he would start the process of pulling the U.S. from the Paris accord, but it didn’t take effect until Nov. 4, 2020, because of provisions in the agreement.

Officially, the United States was only out of the worldwide global climate pact for 107 days. It was part of Trump's withdrawal from global allegiances in general and his oft-stated but false view that global warming was a laughably mistaken take by the world's scientists.

More broadly, Trump reversed Obama-era initiatives to rein in oil, gas and coal emissions and opened new federal lands and waters to exploration and drilling. Biden is working to overturn those measures and additionally has pledged a $2 trillion remake of U.S. power grids, transportation systems and other infrastructure to...

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