Biden invites Russia, China to earliest global climate talks
President Joe Biden is including rivals Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China among the invitees to the earliest big climate talks of his administration, a meeting the U.S. hopes will help shape, increase and deepen global efforts to cut climate-wrecking fossil energy pollution, administration officials advised The Associated Press.
The president is wanting to revive a U.S.-convened forum of the world's major economies about climate that George W. Bush and Barack Obama both used and Donald Trump let languish. Leaders of a number of the world's top climate-change victims., do-gooders and backsliders round out all of those other 40 invitations being sent Friday. It'll be held virtually April 22 and 23.
Hosting the summit will fulfill a plan pledge and executive order simply by Biden, and the administration is timing the function to coincide using its own approaching announcement of what will be considered a very much tougher U.S. focus on for revamping the U.S. economy to sharply lower emissions from coal, gas and oil.
The session - and be it all talk, or some progress - will test Biden's pledge to make climate change a priority among competing political, economic, policy and pandemic problems. In addition, it will pose a very public - and possibly embarrassing or empowering - check of whether U.S. leaders, and Biden in particular, can still get global decision-making following the Trump administration withdrew globally and shook up longstanding alliances.
The Biden administration intentionally looked beyond its international partners for the summit, calling key leaders for what it said would sometimes be tough talks on climate concerns, an administration official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss U.S. ideas for the event.
