Biden’s absence from the climate summit highlights his fossil fuel conundrum

President Biden signed the nation’s first major climate bill and is overseeing record federal investments in clean energy. For the past two years, he attended the annual United Nations Climate Summit, where he reaffirmed U.S. leadership in the fight against global warming.

But this year, which will likely be the hottest in history, Mr. Biden is staying home.

Mr. Biden will not travel to the Dubai summit, according to a White House official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the president’s schedule. Aides say he is consumed with other global crises, namely trying to secure the release of hostages held by Hamas in its war with Israel and trying to convince Congress to approve aid to Ukraine in its fight against Russia.

At home, Mr. Biden’s climate and energy policies are colliding with competing political pressures. Concerned by Republican attacks that Biden is pursuing a “radical green agenda,” centrists in his party want him to talk more about the fact that the United States has produced record amounts of crude oil this year. At the same time, climate activists, especially the young voters who helped elect Biden, want the president to halt drilling altogether.

Internationally, developing countries are pressuring Mr. Biden to fulfill earlier promises for billions of dollars to tackle climate change. But Republicans in Congress who control spending scoff at the idea and have been unable to reach common ground on issues such as aid to Israel and Ukraine.

By bypassing the climate summit known as COP28, Mr. Biden is missing an opportunity to strengthen his climate credentials, said Michele Weindling, the political director of the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led climate activist group.

“If Biden wants to be taken seriously on climate by young people at home and around the world, he must use every tool at his disposal to mobilize the US government to save lives,” she said.

David Victor, co-director of the Deep Decarbonization Initiative at the University of California San Diego, was more blunt. “He really has to worry about keeping the left together and his re-election,” Mr. Victor said.

Mr. Biden has angered environmental groups by authorizing new oil leases, including the Willow oil project in Alaska’s North Slope. He also accelerated exports of liquefied gas to Europe as the country faced an energy crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which made the United States the world’s largest gas exporter.

The United States has produced a record amount of crude oil under Mr. Biden’s watch, and the president has urged fossil fuel companies to produce enough to keep gas prices from rising. At the pump Monday, gasoline prices nationally averaged $3.25 per gallon, which is higher than pre-pandemic levels but 30 cents lower than a year ago.

But he also signed the largest climate bill in American history, the Inflation Reduction Act, which invests at least $370 billion in government subsidies in technologies, such as solar panels and electric cars, aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. His government has also proposed tough new limits on emissions from tailpipes and smokestacks.

Republicans have accused the president of waging a war on American energy, and candidates seeking to unseat Mr. Biden have promised to open federal lands to much more oil and gas drilling.

That has led some in the Democratic Party to urge Biden to bring up oil production. Earlier this month, a new voting group called Blueprint, which aims to help Democrats craft winning messages for the 2024 elections, said Mr. Biden failed to make voters aware of what the group called “moderate” policy outcomes — including “ issuing historic numbers of oil and gas drilling permits.”

At the same time, some conservation groups are calling on Mr. Biden to halt all new drilling. The Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental action group, released a report on Monday, he calculated that greenhouse gas emissions from new oil and gas projects Mr. Biden has approved will exceed the emissions cuts from all his climate policies combined.

Administration officials say privately that their hopes that Mr. Biden would attend a third consecutive summit — which would have set an attendance record for a U.S. president — were complicated by the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas. Mr. Biden has devoted a lot of time and energy to that conflict, including a surprise trip to Israel.

He almost certainly would have had to add another trip to Israel, and probably other countries in the region, if he had chosen to attend the climate conference, aides said.

On Monday, some senior aides made a last-ditch effort to convince Biden to reconsider his plans and make a trip to the summit, which runs until mid-December, although they seemed unlikely to succeed.

More than a hundred other world leaders will appear in Dubai, including King Charles III, Pope Francis, President Emmanuel Macron of France, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

But like Mr Biden, President Xi Jinping of China will also skip the event. Instead, China, which is currently the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, will be represented by Ding Xuexiang, a senior aide to Mr Xi.

Mr Xi and Mr Biden met in California earlier this month and agreed to work on ramping up renewable energy that could replace fossil fuels.

If the two men were to reconsider and appear in Dubai, it would “give a moral boost to everyone” at the summit, said Ani Dasgupta, president of the World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank in Washington.

“It is a very charged moment for the world,” he said.

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 at the Paris summit 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 .

The planet has already warmed by an average of 1.2 degrees Celsius.

“A lot of the conversation will be about ‘Is 1.5 still alive?’” said Joseph Majkut, director of the energy security and climate change program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research center in Washington. “The reality is that it will be incredibly difficult to achieve this.”

One of the key issues at the summit will be whether countries agree to phase out fossil fuels, the combustion of which is the main cause of climate change.

“What we’re pushing for here is sensible policies that everyone can agree on and actually implement,” said John Kerry, Mr Biden’s special envoy for climate change, who will be in Dubai. “There are 199 countries at the COP with differing views on this issue. So we will work to achieve the best possible language.”

Keith Bradsher reporting contributed.