World leaders have unveiled new targets to cut planet-heating pollution at the United Nations, in a bid to spur fresh impetus to the beleaguered climate effort a day after Donald Trump called the crisis “the greatest con job ever perpetrated upon the world”.
A total of 120 countries and the European Union announced new goals to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in New York on Wednesday. The pledges most notably include one from China, the world’s leading emitter, which said it would cut emissions by 7-10% from its peak level by 2035.
António Guterres, the UN secretary-general, convened the special summit for the new goals and urged countries, most of which are badly lagging in efforts to avoid breaching agreed temperature limits, to enact “much further, much faster” cuts.
“Your new plans can take us a significant step forward,” Guterres told government leaders. “We are in the dawn of a new energy era, we must seize this moment of opportunity.”
Guterres, who admitted this week that the international goal of limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5C (2.7F) is at risk of “collapsing”, said that the upcoming UN climate talks in Brazil, known as Cop30, must produce “a credible global response plan to get us on track”.
“The science demands action, the law commands it,” Guterres said, in reference to a recent international court of justice ruling. “The economics compel it and people are calling for it.”
Until now, few countries had submitted updated emissions reduction plans ahead of the Cop30 talks in November, which is meant to feature new targets to help the world avoid worsening heatwaves, droughts, floods and other maladies.
Currently the planet is set to vastly exceed the 1.5C warming limit agreed a decade ago in Paris, with temperatures set to rise by as much as 3C (5.4F) beyond the pre-industrial average, triggering catastrophic consequences for many countries.
This stuttering global effort has been further imperiled by the actions of the US, the world’s largest historic emitter of carbon pollution. On Tuesday, Trump gave a discursive speech littered with falsehoods to the UN, in which he dismissed accepted climate science and scolded leaders for shifting their countries to cleaner forms of energy.
“Countries are on the brink of destruction because of the green energy agenda,” said the US president, who added that climate science is a “hoax”, that wind turbines are “pathetic” and outlined how he has pressed other countries, such as the UK, to drill for more oil.
“If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail,” Trump said. “You need strong borders and traditional energy sources if you are going to be great again … All of these predictions made by the UN, often for bad reasons, are wrong. They were made by stupid people.”
Trump, who has demolished climate regulations, halted clean energy projects and withdrawn the US from the Paris climate deal, has long denied the realities of the climate crisis and his comments drew swift condemnation from activists.
“Anyone looking outside their window knows climate change is here and happening,” said Manish Bapna, chief executive of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The real question is why any responsible leader would try so hard to convince us otherwise.”
Other climate advocates at the UN general assembly and concurrent climate week events also happening in New York said the world should rally on climate regardless of a Trump-led US and accelerate the transition to renewable forms of energy. Last year, $2tn was invested globally in renewables such as solar and wind – double the amount going to oil, gas and coal.
“All of the jobs, all of the opportunity that comes from clean economies is there,” said Rachel Kyte, the UK government’s climate envoy. “So don’t get distracted by the noise. Follow the signal, and I think we’ll get there.
“One hundred and ninety-five countries ratified the Paris agreement and minus one is 194, not zero. There’s plenty of people that would seek to undermine, to threaten the Paris agreement, but 194 countries are showing up in Belém to keep the show on the road.”
Of these countries still engaged in the climate effort, the greatest focus will be on China. It is responsible for around a third of all global emissions but has also become the world’s leading clean energy superpower. On Wednesday, Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, said the country would install more than six times as much wind and solar capacity in 2035, compared with 2020 levels.
“It’s a great tragedy that the United States of America is hobbling itself and allowing China to become the global leader in confronting the climate crisis,” Al Gore, the former US vice-president, said on Wednesday.
But Gore said he was optimistic that the world would follow the clean energy path rather than the fossil-fuel revanchism espoused by Trump. “We are going to win this struggle, we are going to be successful,” he said. “The remaining question is whether or not we will win it in time to avoid the terrible negative tipping points that are out there.”
Regardless of the latest round of announced emissions cuts, known as nationally determined contributions (or NDCs), the world is still on course to blow past 1.5C, a situation that countries vulnerable to sea-level rise and other threats consider to be existential.
“Many of them need to be better,” said Tina Stege, climate envoy of the Marshall Islands, of the pledges. “There has to be a real honest assessment that they won’t be. We already know that these will not get us to where we need to be.”
Governments will convene in Belém, Brazil, in an attempt to bridge this shortfall in November, although delegations may be shrunken due to a lack of available hotel rooms in the Amazon city.
Juan Carlos Navarro, Panama’s minister of the environment, said the logistics of Cop30 have been “a nightmare” and that he has scant optimism of a positive outcome in Brazil. “To be frank, I have seen a lot of hot air and BS and very little progress,” he said.
