At the global biodiversity talks underway in Cali, Colombia, government officials from a single nation wear badges with a red streak along the bottom emblazoned with a small but jarring word: “non-party.”
Call it a diplomatic scarlet letter.
That country is the United States. The only other delegation with the same status is the Holy See. All the other country delegates saunter around the conference with badges that sport an inviting green line with the word “party,” granting them access to rooms where the most sensitive negotiations take place.
When I started covering biodiversity a few years ago, I was surprised to learn that the U.S. wasn’t a member of the treaty that underpins global agreements on the issue. The absence seemed especially significant given the scale of the problem: a decline in global biodiversity that’s unprecedented in human history, threatening not only countless species but the well-being of humans, too.
I quickly came to understand that the U.S. government does indeed participate in U.N. biodiversity talks, and in significant ways. It sends a delegation. It gives hundreds of millions of dollars in biodiversity funding to other countries. And, of course, it takes its own actions to conserve nature. But when decisions are being made at the global talks, the United States is relegated to the diplomatic sidelines along with other observers like advocacy and business groups.
“Of course we would love to have them as a party,” said Astrid Schomaker, executive secretary of the treaty, which is called the Convention on Biodiversity. “But the U.S. is here.”
It started differently. In the 1980s, the U.S. played a significant role in drafting and negotiating the biodiversity treaty. The first President George Bush declined to sign it, but President Bill Clinton did in 1993. The next step was ratification, which requires two-thirds approval by the Senate. Republicans, led by Jesse Helms and Bob Dole, opposed it. U.S. ratification has been a long shot ever since.
Nevertheless, U.S. civil society has long had a big presence at biodiversity talks. This year, it’s present “in droves,” Schomaker said. And a government delegation about three dozen strong flew in from Washington and the embassy in Bogotá.
On a panel on Tuesday, Brenda Mallory, chair of the Biden administration’s Council on Environmental Quality, spoke of how the U.S. was “on track” to safeguard at least 30 percent of its land and waters by 2030. The effort began under the Biden administration in 2021 and it mirrors a global commitment, known as 30×30, reached under the biodiversity treaty the following year.
“The biodiversity and climate crises know no borders, and we really have to fight this together,” she concluded, to applause.
But in Cali, where talks opened on Oct. 21, the United States is at a big disadvantage in that fight. For example, the haggling over language in United Nations negotiations is epic. For the U.S. to suggest a word change, it must ask allies to put forward the proposal. And as countries duke it out in the final days over the thorniest issues, the United States will be relegated farther and farther to the margins.
Cellphones help.
“It really does require another level of diplomacy,” said Christine Dawson, director of the office of conservation and water in the U.S. State Department.
Some of the most substantive decisions on the table at these talks relate to how Indigenous people participate and access funding, how countries will come up with the money they agreed to at the last meeting and how to set up a system for compensating countries for the use of digital genetic information.
The United States is focused on all three of those issues, officials at the State Department said. But late Wednesday, the U.S. and other mere observers had to leave the genetic material talks. It was time for a harder push, and only parties were allowed.
Meanwhile, representatives from another level of U.S. government made themselves known at the talks: the state of California. Officials took the initiative to submit a plan for how the state is implementing its own version of 30×30, which many parties of the treaty have lagged on. On Monday, Wade Crowfoot, California’s secretary of natural resources, held a news conference with tribal representatives who called on President Biden to designate three new national monuments.
Later, Crowfoot lamented the federal government’s status.
“Unfortunately, it conveys a message that the United States doesn’t prioritize this or isn’t doing it, which, over the last four years is actually not true,” he said.
(Secretary Crowfoot’s badge displays the letters “NGO,” meaning nongovernmental organization. That seems odd, but I guess it’s tricky when you represent a regional government of a non-party.)
When I’ve spoken about the United States’ status with delegates and observers from around the world, some point to the fact that the U.S. still participates, but others look down or smirk or shake their heads. They express disappointment or exasperation.
On Wednesday, one delegate for the European Union, Carola Rackete, a leftist member of Parliament, was willing to give her opinion on the record.
“I personally think it’s a scandal,” she said.
Free electricity, anyone? How Britain is trying to green its grid
The problem: History’s biggest polluters need to rapidly pivot away from the fossil fuels that have helped them prosper. That includes Britain, the nation that birthed the Industrial Revolution and built a global empire with coal power.
The fix: Its new government has said it wants to decarbonize its electricity system by the end of this decade. That’s the most ambitious target of any industrialized country, five years ahead of the United States and a full decade ahead of the European Union.
The potential: It means building a lot more stuff, like new solar and wind projects, battery farms and transmission lines. It also means persuading millions of Brits of the benefits, most importantly to their pocketbooks.
As I reported in an article this week, a range of creative experiments are being rolled out to bring the public on board with this huge shift. They include phone alerts when wind power is cheap. Fully electric houses where power is free. Local energy co-ops that invest in solar panels for secondhand shops and bowling alleys.
To Vicky Dunn, who runs a community energy cooperative in a northern town called Grimsby, it feels more constructive than “moaning,” as she put it, about climate change. “It’s part of campaigning for what we want,” she said.
How it plays out holds important lessons for other rich countries trying to ditch fossil fuels.
The obstacles: It can be hard to build new costly infrastructure quickly and to overcome pockets of community opposition to new projects in the countryside.
“The challenge is to bring them in on time, and to do something which is genuinely new, which is to get our hands dirty and, in a sense, curate that energy system,” said Chris Stark, the government adviser in charge of the 2030 clean power target.
What’s next: A government agency plans to propose in the coming weeks a number of pathways to reach that target. That will reveal not only what needs to be built, and where, but also how the electricity system should be overhauled. — Somini Sengupta
Clean energy is booming in the U.S. But the election could change that.
Over the past two years, a surge in clean energy manufacturing has helped push U.S. factory construction to the highest level in half a century. Solar power installations and electric car sales are breaking records. Even Republican-led states like Montana and Utah are writing climate plans to secure federal cash.
Yet the law driving this dizzying transformation of America’s energy landscape, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, is facing a highly uncertain future as next week’s election looms.
Donald Trump has suggested that if he returns to the White House he would gut the law, which is expected to pour as much as $1.2 trillion over the next decade into technologies to fight climate change including wind turbines, solar panels, nuclear reactors, carbon capture and E.V.s, as well as the factories to supply them. — Brad Plumer
More climate news:
Ford is shutting down the Michigan factory that produces its F-150 Lightning plug-in pickup, its signature electric vehicle, Bloomberg reports.
Heatmap News examines a new report that suggests the energy transition is slowing down.
Indirect fatalities from hurricanes and tropical cyclones can persist for 15 years after a storm, according to research explored by Inside Climate News.
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