President Biden told world leaders the U.S. is "back at the table" to join and lead the world in combating climate change, he said at the opening of COP26, the United Nations climate change conference in Glasgow, indirectly referring to his predecessor's withdrawal from the 2015 Paris climate pact.
He went further in remarks shortly afterward, taking the unusual step of apologizing for Mr. Trump.
"I guess I shouldn't apologize, but I do apologize for the fact that the United States, in the last administration, pulled out of the Paris Accord and put us sort of behind the eight ball," he said at another opening day event.
He and over 100 country leaders who signed the 2015 Paris climate agreement and are attending the summit in Glasgow. Mr. Biden called on other countries to "step up to the plate," and said the meeting in Glasgow "isn't the end of the journey," but "just the starting line to begin to really take for the first time really decisive action."
In his address, Mr. Biden sought to stress that human-caused damage to the climate was already taking a devastating toll on people through natural disasters, and it could only be addressed if nations come together.
"Worse is yet to come if we fail to seize this moment," the president said, promising that the U.S. would lead by example, not words.
Prince Charles also addressed the leaders, warning them that "the eyes and hopes of the world are upon you to act with all dispatch, and decisively, because time has run out." And Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who kicked off the conference, portrayed the need for climate action in stark terms, saying that the world is strapped to a "ticking doomsday device."
This is the 26th time world leaders have met to try to limit global warming. The conference was postponed for a year as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, but the extra year of preparation doesn't seem to have improved its chance of success.
The high-stakes summit has been called a last chance for countries to come together to stop catastrophic global warming. Almost 200 nations sent high-level delegations. They hope to put the world back on track to meet the goals set in Paris, including reducing global carbon emissions to zero by 2050, and limiting the planet's overall warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit.
Scientists calculate that to do that, planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions need to be halved by the end of this decade. As it stands now, they'll continue to rise. Experts warn that time left to take action to achieve the Paris goals is quickly slipping away, and the consequences of failure would be catastrophic for humanity.
Under the Paris agreement, governments were supposed to make increasingly larger cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions. But the required cuts haven't been made. The wildfires, storms, heatwaves, melting of polar ice and rising sea levels we've seen already are just a taste of what could come.
"Everything that science had actually looked at was underestimated," former U.N. climate chief Christina Figueres, who is widely credited with banging heads together to make the Paris deal happen, told CBS News ahead of COP26. "In terms of the degree of heating, the impacts, the human misery cost, the infrastructure cost… it's all happening faster than we ever thought."
Climate change tops Mr. Biden's overseas agenda. He arrived on Monday fresh from the G20 economic summit in Rome, where he said his personal relationships with other leaders allowed them to make real progress.
But as he and other world leaders spoke about getting the world back on track, there were some notable absences. President Xi Jinping of China and Russia's Vladimir Putin chose not to attend COP26.
Before he arrived, Mr. Biden said the focus should be on what countries like China, Russia and Saudi Arabia are not doing to address climate change, and he called it "disappointing" that those nations "basically didn't show up, in terms of any commitments to deal with climate change."
"Anyone that goes to COP26 to expect that we're going to guarantee a pathway to 1.5 [degrees temperature cap] is simply not seeing the reality of things," Figueres told CBS News. "We're just not going to get there."
Instead, she said the conference should be about "getting healthily close to 1.5 degrees."
Even that may prove a mighty challenge.
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