Live Updates: Biden, Kicking Off Summit, Says U.S. ‘Has Resolved to Take Action’ on Climate Change

President Biden on Thursday declared America “has resolved to take action” on climate change and called on world leaders to significantly accelerate their own plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or risk a disastrous collective failure to stop catastrophic climate change.

In a show of renewed commitment after four years of the Trump administration’s unvarnished climate denial, Mr. Biden formally pledged that the United States would cut its emissions at least in half from 2005 levels by 2030. Barely three months into Mr. Biden’s presidency, the contrast with his science-denying predecessor, Donald J. Trump, could not have been more striking.

“The signs are unmistakable, the science is undeniable and the cost of inaction keeps mounting,” Mr. Biden said.

While the summit is an international one, Mr. Biden’s speech was also aimed at a domestic audience, focusing not just on America’s obligation to help cut its global emissions but on the jobs he believes are available in greening the U.S. economy.

“The countries that take decisive actions now” to tackle climate change, Mr. Biden said, “will be the ones that reap the clean energy benefits of the boom that’s coming.”

But one of Mr. Biden’s biggest political obstacles is international: Republicans say the United States should not be asked to sacrifice if the world’s largest emitters will swallow U.S. efforts in their pollution.

Joining Mr. Biden on Thursday, President Xi Jinping of China restated promises his nation already has made to “strive to peak” emissions by the end of this decade and reach carbon neutrality by 2060. Mr. Xi said coal would be on its way out after 2025, which is realistically the only way to reach the 2030 carbon neutrality goal. Coal use may have already peaked in China, according to experts.

Mr. Xi also noted that China’s goals call for “extraordinary efforts” and maintained it is cutting emissions “in a much shorter time span than what might take many developed countries.”

Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India made no new commitment, but reiterated his nation’s promise of installing 450 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity by 2030. He also said that his country’s per capita emissions are far smaller than other major emitters.

“We in India are doing our part,” Mr. Modi said. “Despite our development challenges we have taken many bold steps.”

The summit is the first of its kind to be convened by a United States president, and Mr. Biden is joined by other world leaders like Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada.

Mr. Trudeau pledged Canada would reduce its greenhouse emissions levels 40 percent to 45 percent from 2005 levels by 2030, compared with its previous target of a 30 percent emissions reduction in the same time frame. Japan also announced that it would cut emissions 46 percent below 2013 levels by the end of the decade, a significant show of solidarity with the United States.

Mr. Biden’s target of 50 percent to 52 percent by the end of the decade calls for a steep and rapid decline of fossil fuel use in virtually every sector of the American economy and marks the start of what is sure to be a bitter partisan fight over achieving it.

The two-day summit comes at a time when scientists are warning that governments must take decisive action to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees above preindustrial levels. The consequences of exceeding that threshold includes mass species extinctions, water shortages and extreme weather events that will be most devastating to the poorest countries least responsible for causing global warming.

Officially, nations that are party to the Paris agreement are obligated to announce their new targets for emissions cuts in time for a United Nations conference in Scotland in November.

President Xi Jinping of China said his country would “strictly limit increasing coal consumption” in the next five years and phase it down in the following five years.

That’s significant because China is, by far, the world’s largest coal consumer and is continuing to expand its fleet of coal-fired power plants. Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel.

Mr. Xi repeated his pledge from last year to draw down carbon emissions to net zero by 2060. And, in a pointed reminder to his host, President Biden, he said that the industrialized countries of the West had a historic responsibility to act faster to reduce emissions.

The United States is history’s largest emitter. China is today’s largest emitter.

Mr. Xi added a conciliatory note by saying “China looks forward to working with the international community, including with the United States” on addressing climate change.

Neither China nor India, whose prime minister, Narendra Modi, spoke after Mr. Xi, made any new commitments to ramp up their climate ambitions. Mr. Modi repeated India’s pledge to expand its fleet of renewable energy projects, urged people to make lifestyle changes to address climate change, and announced a vague new partnership with the United States on green energy projects.

India’s once-galloping economy has slowed sharply and the country is currently in the throes of a deadly coronavirus surge.

President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil on Thursday pledged to eliminate illegal deforestation by 2030, a promise that was met with extreme skepticism by those in the environmental community who have seen the destruction of the Amazon skyrocket under his watch.

Speaking at a global climate summit hosted by the United States, Mr. Bolsonaro also vowed that Brazil would become carbon neutral by 2050, a decade earlier than it had previously said it would. The new goal puts it in line with promises that many developed nations have made.

Ending deforestation by 2030, he claimed, would cut Brazil’s emissions 50 percent. And despite significantly weakening his country’s environmental enforcement agencies during his tenure, Mr. Bolsonaro promised they would be strengthened.

In 2020, Brazil’s space agency reported that deforestation had surged to its highest levels in 12 years.

While Mr. Bolsonaro did not explicitly ask on Thursday for funding in return for his promise, in a letter earlier this week he told John Kerry, President Biden’s climate envoy, that Brazil “deserves to be fairly compensated for the Environmental Services its citizens provide for the planet.” He also pointed fingers at more developed countries for decades of burning fossil fuels, noting that Brazil accounts for just 1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Marcio Astrini, who heads the Climate Observatory, an environmental protection organization in Brazil, cautioned this week that Mr. Bolsonaro “wants new money with no real constraints,” adding, “This is not a trustworthy government.”

Beyond the big two of the United States and China, here’s an overview of what some American allies and adversaries have said so far at President Biden’s virtual climate summit with world leaders on Thursday.

• Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pledged that Canada would reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent to 45 percent from 2005 levels by 2030, a step up from its previous target of a 30 percent reduction in the same time frame. This is a significant increase in ambition for an economy that is still highly dependent on oil extraction, and a sign that Mr. Biden’s decision to increase the United States’ target is having an influence on his closest allies.

• Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India reiterated his country’s promise to install 450 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity by 2030, but made no new commitments. He argued that India’s per capita emissions were far smaller than those of other major emitters and said, “We, in India, are doing our part.”

• Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga announced that Japan would cut emissions 46 percent below 2013 levels by the end of the decade, a significant show of solidarity with the United States.

• President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, the world’s fourth largest greenhouse gas polluter, made only a vague pledge to “significantly reduce the net accumulated emissions in our country by 2050.” He highlighted a carbon pricing pilot program that he said would allow the Sakhalin region to become carbon neutral by 2025, but he said nothing about construction of the Nord Stream 2, a major natural gas pipeline that is opposed by both climate advocates and United States national security advisers.

Coral Davenport, Lisa Friedman and Somini Sengupta contributed reporting.

Fossil fuel industry leaders reacted carefully Thursday to President Biden’s pledge to cut United States emissions in half by 2030.

Representatives from oil, gas and coal industries all issued statements saying they were committed to reducing the planet-warming pollution that their industries produce, and which scientists say are the dominant cause of climate change.

None directly criticized Mr. Biden’s promise to cut U.S. emissions between 50 and 52 percent below 2005 levels by the end of the decade. But all insisted their industries will play a part in a decarbonized society, despite multiple studies showing that meeting the new U.S. goal will require a dramatic draw down of fossil fuels.

“Setting economywide goals to reduce GHG emissions is important to combating global climate change,” Amy Andryszak, president of the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America said in a statement.

Ms. Andryszak said companies in her trade organization are “fully committed to being part of the climate solution” and that natural gas “provides tremendous opportunities for our nation and world to achieve climate goals.”

The increased use of natural gas in replacing coal has largely been responsible for drops in U.S. emissions over the past decade, but gas also produces methane, an equally dangerous greenhouse gas.

Mike Sommers, president of the American Petroleum Institute, said his oil industry trade group “supports the goals of the Paris Agreement” but added the new U.S. target “addresses only half of the dual challenge” of reducing emissions while providing affordable energy.

He called on the Biden administration to impose a price on carbon and invest in innovation.

Michelle Bloodworth, president of America’s Power which represents coal producers and companies with coal-fired power plants, did not mention the targets explicitly or the Paris Agreement, but said the trade group “looks forward to working with the administration and Congress to find ways to reduce carbon emissions while ensuring the nation’s electricity grid is both reliable and resilient.”

President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris kicked off the virtual international climate summit on Thursday, Earth Day, at 8 a.m. with remarks that highlighted the importance of global efforts to reduce carbon emissions. Pope Francis will speak on the same topic later.

Here is a breakdown of the biggest names and the topics they will address over the next two days.

Economics and Pope Francis

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and David Malpass, the World Bank president, who has recently expressed support for a net-zero carbon future, joined a morning session on financing climate change solutions. Later, speakers will highlight climate work on the local level and discuss security challenges posed by global warming.

On Thursday afternoon, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas will participate in a panel to discuss the logistical challenges climate change poses for government agencies.

The pope is scheduled to appear via video link sometime during the session that began at 10:30 a.m. In 2015, he published a treatise calling for countries to “care for our common home” and to accept scientific conclusions about human-induced global warming.

International security and geopolitics

On Thursday afternoon, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III; the director of national intelligence, Avril D. Haines; and Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. representative to the United Nations, will participate in a panel on the international security implications of climate change with the Japanese defense minister, Nobuo Kishi, and Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg of NATO.

On Friday, John Kerry, Mr. Biden’s top climate envoy, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel will join a session on the importance of technological innovation in reducing carbon emissions.

Opportunities for businesses

On Friday, the secretary of transportation, Pete Buttigieg; the United States trade representative, Katherine C. Tai; and Mr. Biden’s climate advisers will convene a panel exploring the “the economic benefits of green recovery and long-term decarbonization.” The panel will also include business leaders and union officials.

Former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, a billionaire who has bankrolled climate-related groups, will speak later in the day.

Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder, will also speak as the founder of Breakthrough Energy, an investment fund that supports projects to reduce carbon emissions.

Which world leaders are attending?

President Xi Jinping of China, the United States’ biggest rival on the world stage, is attending the virtual summit. So are Presidents Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, with whom the Biden administration is trying to negotiate a plan to protect the Amazon rainforest.

A number of prominent American allies have spoken, including Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. Other key attendees include Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, President Moon Jae-in of South Korea and Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga of Japan — leaders from whom the Biden administration has been trying to secure commitments on emission reduction targets.

King Salman of Saudi Arabia, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico are also attending. The White House has invited more than 40 world leaders in total.

What actions might be taken?

Mr. Biden announced that the United States intended to cut planet-warming emissions in half by the end of the decade, a target that will require Americans to transform the way they drive, heat their homes and manufacture goods.

This nearly doubles the pledge made by the Obama administration, and the Biden administration hopes the announcement will galvanize other nations to increase their own targets.

Britain, Norway and the United States said Thursday they would join forces with some of the world’s biggest companies in an effort to rally more than $1 billion for countries that can show they are lowering emissions by protecting tropical forests.

The goal is to make intact forests more economically valuable than they would be if the land were cleared for timber and agriculture.

The initiative comes as the world loses acre after acre of forests to feed global demand for soy, palm oil, timber and cattle. Those forests, from Brazil to Indonesia, are essential to limiting the linked crises of climate change and a global biodiversity collapse. They are also home to Indigenous and other forest communities.

Amazon, Nestlé, Unilever, GlaxoSmithKline and Salesforce are among the companies promising money for the new initiative, known as the LEAF Coalition.

Last year, despite the global downturn triggered by the pandemic, tropical deforestation was up 12 percent from 2019, collectively wiping out an area about the size of Switzerland. That destruction released about twice as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as cars in the United States emit annually.

“The LEAF Coalition is a groundbreaking example of the scale and type of collaboration that is needed to fight the climate crisis and achieve net-zero emissions globally by 2050,” John Kerry, President Biden’s senior climate envoy, said in a statement. “Bringing together government and private-sector resources is a necessary step in supporting the large-scale efforts that must be mobilized to halt deforestation and begin to restore tropical and subtropical forests.”

An existing global effort called REDD+ has struggled to attract sufficient investment and gotten mired in bureaucratic slowdowns. This initiative builds on it, bringing private capital to the table at the country or state level.

Until now, companies have invested in forests more informally, sometimes supporting questionable projects that prompted accusations of corruption and “greenwashing,” when a company or brand portrays itself as an environmental steward but its true actions don’t support the claim.

The new initiative will use satellite imagery to verify results across wide areas to guard against those problems. Monitoring entire jurisdictions would, in theory, prevent governments from saving forestland in one place only to let it be cut down elsewhere.

Under the plan, countries, states or provinces with tropical forests would commit to reducing deforestation and degradation. Each year or two, they would submit their results, calculating the number of tons of carbon dioxide reduced by their efforts. An independent monitor would verify their claims using satellite images and other measures. Companies and governments would contribute to a pool of money that would pay the national or regional government at least $10 per ton of reduced carbon dioxide.

Companies will not be allowed to participate unless they have a scientifically sound plan to reach net zero emissions, according to Nigel Purvis, the chief executive of Climate Advisers, a group affiliated with the initiative.

“Their number one obligation to the world from a climate standpoint is to reduce their own emissions across their supply chains, across their products, everything,” Mr. Purvis said. He also emphasized that the coalition’s plans would respect the rights of Indigenous and forest communities.

One of the most dissected speeches at the virtual climate summit hosted by President Biden on Thursday and Friday will be the one by his counterpart from China, Xi Jinping.

That is because China is currently the world’s biggest producer of greenhouse gas emissions and the biggest consumer of the single-biggest source of emissions: coal.

China continues to build new coal plants at home and abroad, part of a global trend that threatens to undermine the world’s chances of slowing down climate change.

In 2020, China added more coal capacity than the rest of the world retired. India and Southeast Asia are also expanding their coal fleets, though neither as fast as they were a few years ago.

The International Energy Agency said on Tuesday that coal demand was set to soar this year. That’s bad for air pollution in the areas where coal is burned and mined. It also makes it harder to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2030.

The agency’s chief, Fatih Birol, called those findings “a dire warning.”

Americans still buy roughly 17 million gasoline-burning vehicles each year. Each of those cars and light trucks can be expected to stick around for 10 or 20 years as they are sold and resold in used car markets. And even after that, the United States exports hundreds of thousands of older used cars annually to countries such as Mexico or Iraq, where the vehicles can last even longer with repeated repairs.

Cutting emissions from transportation, which accounts for nearly one-third of America’s greenhouse gas emissions, will be a difficult, painstaking task. President Biden has set a goal of bringing down the nation’s emissions to net zero by 2050. Doing so is likely to require replacing virtually all gasoline-powered cars and trucks with cleaner electric vehicles charged largely by low-carbon power sources such as sun, wind or nuclear plants.

Here is a deeper look at how far away that goal remains.

Like so many other things over the past year, much of the activism around Earth Day 2021 is virtual, unfolding as a livestream celebration at Earthday.org.

Earth Day is today, April 22nd. But events marking the day stretch way beyond 24 hours, and include President Biden’s two-day climate summit. This year will be missing the enormous protests that have been a hallmark of the climate movement but some groups gathered in smaller ways to drive home their messages.

On Wednesday, groups of activists came to Washington, including 350.org, US Youth Climate Strike and Build Back Fossil Free. They brought portable versions of “climate clocks.” These devices, some of them enormous, count down, by some measures, the time left to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

A group of climate-focused officials from capital cities across Latin America known as Mayors of the Americas also held an event in Washington on Wednesday to discuss their own cities’ commitments to reach carbon neutrality before 2040; one group left a clock at the White House. In New York City, three protesters from Extinction Rebellion NYC glued themselves to the windows of NBC’s Today show studio during the live broadcast.

Gulf Coast environmental activists are in Washington, as well, to hold a Louisiana-style “second line” parade to the White House “to demand that Biden recognize the Gulf is in crisis and declare a national emergency, stop fossil fuel projects, reinstate the Crude Oil Export Ban and halt the harm to Gulf communities like mine,” said Sharon Lavigne, founder of the environmental group RISE St. James, which fights the effects of industrial pollution on vulnerable communities. “I love my home,” she said, “and I don’t want to have to move.”

Washington Roundup

The Senate voted to confirm Vanita Gupta as associate attorney general on Wednesday, making her the first civil rights lawyer and the first woman of color to serve as the Justice Department’s No. 3 official.

Ms. Gupta will oversee the department’s vast civil division, which is tasked with defending the Biden administration in court, as well as its antitrust, tax, and environment and natural resources divisions. She will also oversee the Civil Rights Division, which she once led.

Ms. Gupta was confirmed 51 to 49, largely along party lines. Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, broke with her party after groups representing Alaska Native women, survivors of domestic violence and other communities said they supported Ms. Gupta’s nomination.

“I was impressed not only with her passion that she carries but the work that she performs,” Ms. Murkowski said on the Senate floor. She added that, while some of Ms. Gupta’s previous public statements troubled her, she would “give the benefit of the doubt to a woman who I believe has demonstrated through her professional career to be committed to matters of political justice.”

Ms. Gupta, 46, rose to national prominence soon after she graduated from New York University’s School of Law in 2001. She began working at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where she investigated a series of arrests and drug-related convictions of dozens of men, almost all of them Black, in Tulia, Texas.

Ms. Gupta proved that the drug charges had been fabricated by a narcotics agent named Tom Coleman, who was found guilty of perjury. In 2003, Rick Perry, then the governor of Texas, pardoned 35 people as a result of that case.

As a staff lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, Ms. Gupta built bridges with police departments and human rights groups as part of her efforts to overhaul the criminal justice system.

Conservative stalwarts involved in criminal justice reform, like Koch Industries and Grover Norquist, joined progressive groups in supporting Ms. Gupta’s confirmation. So did more than a dozen law enforcement organizations, including the National Sheriffs’ Association, the Major Cities Chiefs Association and the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

Nevertheless, Republicans largely declined to vote for her. Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, said on the Senate floor that the lack of support was a result “of her radical record far outside the mainstream and her career as a partisan activist.”

In other developments in Washington:

• The Biden administration is weighing how to overhaul a Trump-era tax incentive that was pitched as a way to drive investment to economically depressed swaths of the country but which early evidence suggests has primarily fueled real estate development in areas that were already becoming richer and whiter. The so-called opportunity zone program, a creation of President Donald J. Trump’s 2017 tax law that Mr. Biden vowed on the campaign trail to reform, gives tax breaks to certain investors who pour money into designated areas.

• Under President Donald J. Trump, Republicans had largely abandoned their zeal for austerity and endorsed a series of spending increases. But with a Democratic president in the White House, Senate Republicans are trying to reclaim the mantle of fiscal conservatism by adopting multiple symbolic resolutions aimed at curbing federal spending.

The House voted on Thursday to grant statehood to the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., taking action on a long-held Democratic priority that has become a core element of the party’s push to expand voting rights and address racial inequity.

The legislation, approved 216 to 208, would establish a 51st state called Washington, Douglass Commonwealth — named in honor of Frederick Douglass, the Black emancipation and civil rights leader — while leaving the National Mall, Capitol Hill, the White House and some other federal property under congressional control.

The new state would have a single voting representative in the House and two senators representing more than 700,000 residents.

The House passed the statehood legislation last year over united G.O.P. opposition, but it died in the Senate, where Republicans who controlled the chamber at the time declined to consider it. On Thursday, Republicans opposed the legislation again, calling it a Democratic power grab.

Even with Democrats now in control of an evenly divided 50-50 Senate, prospects for the measure remain very much in doubt: Not every Senate Democrat has publicly endorsed the proposal, and at least 10 Republicans would likely be needed to support advancing it, while none have said they would.

“Congress is taking a significant step to enfranchise the people of D.C. and empower them to participate fully in our democracy,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, said at a news conference on Wednesday. “We’re excited that we will pass it — we will celebrate — and we hope that the momentum will help it pass in the Senate so that the president can sign it into law.”

The White House confirmed this week that Mr. Biden supported statehood for the nation’s capital, with the Office of Management and Budget declaring in a statement that statehood would “make our union stronger and more just.”

Some statehood proponents have begun pushing for the stand-alone measure to be incorporated into sweeping legislation that would overhaul national elections, which Democrats have made a top priority.

The vote was part of a flurry of activity on Thursday on Capitol Hill, where the Senate was on track to pass legislation to combat hate crimes against Asian-Americans and Republicans in that chamber were set to offer the outlines of their counteroffer to President Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure package.

The Myanmar military’s coup and brutal crackdown on dissent have left it with few allies in the West. But a sophisticated corporate lobbying operation in Washington is trying to persuade the Biden administration not to impose broad sanctions against a state-owned oil and gas company helping to finance the junta.

Chevron, the second-largest oil and gas producer in the United States, has sent lobbyists — including some former federal officials, one of whom appears to have left the State Department just last month — to the State Department, other agencies and congressional offices, according to four people familiar with the lobbying.

The company says sanctions could endanger the long-term viability of a big Myanmar gas field in which it is a partner, worsen a humanitarian crisis for people who rely on the operation for power, and expose employees to criminal charges.

Chevron has a longstanding relationship with Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise, or MOGE, which is closely connected to the military generals who seized power from elected leaders on Feb. 1. Since then, the military has killed an estimated 740 citizens of Myanmar and detained thousands more.

Democrats, diplomats and human rights activists are pressing the Biden administration to impose sanctions on MOGE, which a United Nations human rights investigator told Congress last month “is now effectively controlled by a murderous criminal enterprise.”