Brazil: From the Amazon, Biden sends a message to Trump on the climate

US President Joe Biden sent a message to protect the environment to his successor Donald Trump on Sunday, calling to work “for humanity” during a historic visit to the Amazon on Sunday.

“The fight to protect our planet is literally a fight for humanity for generations to come,” said the 81-year-old president in a statement from the heart of the rainforest in Manaus, Brazil (north).

Global warming is “perhaps the only existential threat to all our nations and all humanity,” he insisted, surrounded by majestic trees.

The first American president to serve in the Amazon

Joe Biden, touring South America in what will likely be his last major foreign trip, made a stop in the Amazon between an Asia-Pacific summit that ended Saturday in Lima and a meeting of G20 leaders starting Monday in Rio de Janeiro.

This is the first American president in office to go to the Amazon, and a visit full of symbolism a few months before the return to the White House of Donald Trump, which raises concerns about the future climate policy of the United States, the world’s second largest emitter. of greenhouse gases after China.

The outgoing president also resolutely defended his record, having passed the “Inflation Reduction Act”, a major plan for the energy transition providing for hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies, including tax breaks for electric vehicles.

“Drill at all costs”

“Some may try to deny or delay the clean energy revolution that is underway in America. But no one, no one can go back on that,” he assured.

While the Democrat has made the fight against climate change a strong focus of his presidency, the Republican promised during his campaign to “drill at all costs”, questioned the reality of climate change, and said he wanted to go out again the United States of the Paris Climate Accord, as he did during his first term.

Joe Biden arrived early in the afternoon in Manaus, where he was greeted as he got off the plane by local officials and by Carlos Nobre, Brazilian climatologist awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 as a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The latter accompanied him for a flight over the forest.

“The largest bilateral donor in the world”

Joe Biden then went to a nature reserve, accompanied by his daughter Ashley and his granddaughter Natalie.

Another symbol, at a time when participants in the COP29 climate conference in Baku are arguing over who should finance the fight against climate change: the White House announced on Sunday that the United States had reached its commitment to carry out climate change by 2024. to $11 billion their bilateral aid for the fight against climate change.

They thus become “the largest bilateral donor in the world in terms of climate finance”, according to Washington. “No state should boast of being the largest bilateral donor. It is the total contribution in terms of climate financing that counts and the United States has never achieved its fair share,” explains Friederike Röder, specialist in climate finance from the NGO Global Citizen.

The United States is criticized for preferring bilateral aid to financing multilateral funds co-managed by developing countries. And the European Union remains the world’s largest contributor to climate finance.

A historic drought

Joe Biden also announced in Manaus a doubling, to one hundred million dollars, of the American contribution to the Amazon Fund, an international fund for the protection of this forest.

The Amazon rainforest, which stretches across nine countries, plays a crucial role in combating climate change thanks to its capacity to absorb carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. It is also one of the areas most vulnerable to climate change.

While it is usually one of the wettest regions in the world, it has been hit by a historic drought which has contributed to its worst fires in two decades, although most of the fires are of criminal origin.

Deforestation has also caused it to lose in four decades an area roughly equivalent to that of Germany and France combined, estimated a recent study by the Amazon Network for Socio-Environmental and Geographic Information (RAISG), a collective researchers and NGOs.

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