A Climate Change Summit without China and Russia
A Climate Change summit without the participation of China and Russia because of political tensions with the United States is a setback for reaching global consensus on the fight against global warming. The world needs realistic environmental policies on global warming, but Joe Biden's government's bid to isolate China and Russia from major international policy decisions is becoming a controversial issue due to the weight of their economies in the world.
The United States and the European Union (EU) have 844 million of the world's 7,904 million inhabitants and are responsible for 22.3 % of the world's carbon dioxide emissions. In contrast, China and Russia have 1.553 billion people and are responsible for 35% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions. It is imperative that the United States and Europe must rethink their policies towards the rest of the world due to new shifts in global power. Without China and Russia, the world's largest producer of manufactured goods, the leading power in the new technology revolution and the largest emitter of carbon dioxide on the planet, and without Russia, the world's largest military and energy power, whose pollution levels are equivalent to half the emissions of the European Union, it is difficult to meet the targets for reducing pollution levels in the world.
Given the political and economic crises facing the US and the EU, it is clear that they are not in a position to impose certain rules of the game in international politics on China, Russia, and India. Although the Biden Administration brought the US back into the Climate Change agreements and at the G20 meeting and in Glasgow reiterated its commitment to the fight against climate change, at the time of writing, members of Congress have not reached an agreement on the approval of the $555 billion economic package to develop climate change policies.
As discussions and negotiations go, the outlook is not flattering and hopes for a more effective policy are fading amidst the rhetoric of the speeches. It is known that the discussions on the Paris Agreement in 2015 were quite hopeful in terms of the proposed goals, but at the Madrid summit in 2019, the results were not flattering. In the words of UN Secretary-General António Guterres, at that summit "the international community missed an important opportunity to show greater ambition" and admitted that the agreements did not have sufficient consensus, given that the countries that advocated compliance with the Paris Agreement represent only 10% of the planet's emissions. At that summit, countries such as China, India, Brazil, and the United States, which generate more than 50 % of emissions, opposed reaching a consensus on the proposed targets.
Discussions took place on the basis of the interests of two large blocs. The first, led by the European Union, pledged to review its 2020 carbon dioxide reduction targets, and argued for tougher plans to be discussed next year. The second bloc, led by the US, China, India and Russia, the powers that account for more than half of global emissions, were evasive in taking on the targets set out in the Paris Agreement. Now in Glasgow, the picture does not look very clear, given that the big absentees are China, Russia and Brazil, the latter with the largest areas of natural forests in the world.
@j15mosquera