Today, the Biden administration released a new Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), as called for under the Paris Agreement. In the third round of NDCs, in which countries are setting targets for 2035, the US says it will reduce emissions by 61-66% from 2005 levels. This has been met with mixed reactions from US civil society groups, including ActionAid, but also raises two immediate questions: is this enough to meet the goals set in the Paris Agreement? And does this matter at all since Donald Trump is taking office in just over a month?
With regards to the first question, unfortunately, this NDC does not do enough to put the world on track to limit warming to 1.5°C, nor does it represent a fair share of US climate action relative to other countries. The most recent fair share NDC that we and other civil society activists released earlier this summer called for an 80% reduction from 2005 levels domestically and nearly $450 billion a year in climate finance.
The administration’s 61-66% domestic target is obviously lower than what we called for; more pressingly, the NDC does not really wrestle with the need for a fossil fuel phaseout. If we were serious about 1.5°C, a fossil fuel phaseout target, both for usage and production, in addition to a commitment for no new leases and drilling, would be a necessity for a US NDC.
More disappointing is the lack of a climate finance commitment. The US fair share is so large it cannot be done by domestic action alone. In order to keep warming to 1.5°C, developing countries will need to do far more climate action than is possible without international support. Therefore, any serious plan for stopping the climate crisis must include huge transfers of resources from developed to developing countries. Climate finance is one area of climate policy where the Biden Administration has most consistently fallen short; in the future, any administration looking to be a climate leader will need to be better.
On the other hand, virtually anything would be an improvement over what Donald Trump is promising. He openly put climate policies up for sale to fossil fuel executives during the campaign, has promised to drop out of the Paris Agreement on day one, and may be flirting with withdrawing from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) entirely. So why bother putting out an NDC that will likely be ripped to shreds the minute he takes office?
The fundamental truth is that the climate crisis will not pause while Donald Trump is in office. Whatever Trump chooses to do at the federal level, we must be laying the groundwork for the policies we actually need. That includes enacting policies at state and local level, pressuring corporations to put forward real climate action, building up community resilience to the impacts of climate change – and ensuring that radically transformative action can be taken at the federal and global levels as soon as Trump is out of power. To those ends, this NDC provides a useful baseline as we work towards the policies needed to keep people safe. When another President takes office and rejoins the global effort to stop the climate crisis, this NDC should be the floor on which we commit to significantly stronger action, at a level that would represent a real fair share of effort from the world’s biggest historical polluter.