Biden will skip the UN climate summit, the White House says

President Biden will not attend the major United Nations climate summit, which starts Thursday in Dubai. In doing so, he will skip an event expected to be attended by King Charles III, Pope Francis and leaders from nearly 200 countries, a White House official said Sunday.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the president’s schedule, gave no reason why Biden will not appear at the two-week summit known as COP28.

But senior White House aides suggested the war between Israel and Hamas had consumed the president in recent weeks and days as he pushed for a pause in the fighting and the release of hostages held by Hamas.

“They have the war in the Middle East and a war in Ukraine, there’s all kinds of things going on,” John Kerry, Mr. Biden’s special envoy for climate change, said when asked in an interview last week about the plans of Mr. Biden. . Mr. Kerry and his team will be in Dubai.

Kirsten Allen, spokeswoman for Vice President Kamala Harris, said last week that Ms. Harris had no plans to attend COP28.

Tackling global warming has been a central domestic and international issue for Mr. Biden, who earlier this month called climate change “the ultimate threat to humanity.”

For the past two years, Mr. Biden has attended the annual U.N. climate conference, the location of which is changing. In 2021, Mr. Biden traveled to Glasgow for the talks, where he apologized for the United States’ brief withdrawal from a global climate pact under President Donald J. Trump, who mocked climate science.

Last year, he made a three-hour stop in Egypt for the summit, where he reaffirmed U.S. leadership in the global fight against climate change and promoted the passage of the country’s most important climate law. That legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, will direct at least $370 billion into clean energy over the next decade. Mr Biden told the assembled leaders it would help the rest of the world move away from fossil fuels.

Climate activists are likely to be angry about Mr Biden’s decision to abandon this year’s UN talks. But analysts said it was not typical for a US president to attend every climate summit.

In Dubai, leaders are expected to discuss their progress, or lack thereof, in limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.

That’s the threshold above which scientists say people will struggle to adapt to the intensification of wildfires, heat waves, droughts and storms. In 2015, countries agreed to reduce emissions from burning coal, oil and gas to keep global warming “well below 2 degrees Celsius,” and ideally no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.

But the planet has already warmed by an average of 1.2 degrees Celsius, and although the United States and some other countries have reduced their greenhouse gases, global emissions continue to rise.

Scientists say the world must cut emissions 43 percent below 2019 levels by 2030 to avoid catastrophic effects of climate change. But current national climate plans will only achieve a 7 percent reduction.

In Dubai, countries are expected to discuss ways to step up climate action and debate whether they will agree to a phase-out of fossil fuels.

David Victor, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, said the work could be handled by Mr. Kerry and others.

“I don’t quite understand why you would send a president to an event that has no clear outcome,” Mr. Victor said. Biden’s absence, he said, sends “a message that not much can be done by sending in a leader.”

About 70,000 people are expected to attend COP28. The United States is likely to come under fire at the summit for failing to deliver on its promises to help developing countries transition to clean energy and adapt to climate change.

Alden Meyer, a senior fellow at E3G, an environmental research organization, said he thought it was important for leaders, including Mr. Biden and President Xi Jinping of China, to attend the summits. But he noted that the United States and China, the world’s two biggest emitters, recently signed a joint deal to boost renewable energy sources with the aim of displacing coal, gas and oil.

“If President Xi and President Biden can build on the work that their two special envoys have done, that could be more important than them actually showing up and joining dozens or hundreds of other world leaders in scripted dialogues,” Mr. Meyer said.