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COP26: Barack Obama calls out China, Russia for lack of urgency on climate efforts
- Obama’s presence comes as part of a show of force by US officials who are fanning across the summit to argue the country has never stopped fighting climate change
- He began his day in a session on island resilience, sitting alongside representatives from Fiji, Grenada and the Marshall Islands – nations particularly vulnerable to encroaching seas
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Former US president Barack Obama on Monday faulted China and Russia for what he called a “dangerous absence of urgency” in cutting their own climate-wrecking emissions as he delivered a speech at the COP26 summit.
The UN climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, is Obama’s first since he helped deliver the triumph of the 2015 Paris climate accord, when nations committed to cutting fossil fuel and agricultural emissions fast enough to keep the Earth’s warming below catastrophic levels.
Climate summits since then have been less conclusive, especially as the US under President Donald Trump dropped out of the Paris accord. President Joe Biden has since rejoined.
In prepared remarks obtained by the AP ahead of a speech to activists, Obama noted efforts by the United States – the world’s second-worst climate polluter now after China – stalled when Trump pulled out of the climate accord.
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“I wasn’t real happy about that,” he admitted.
Despite opposition within Biden’s own Democratic party that has blocked the climate-fighting legislation, Obama said he was confident that some version of Biden’s ambitious climate bill will pass in Congress in the weeks to come.
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“It will set the United States on course to meet its new climate targets,” he said.
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