With Methane and Forest Deals, Climate Summit Offers Hope After Gloomy Start

GLASGOW — The world leaders gathered at a crucial climate summit secured new agreements on Tuesday to end deforestation and reduce emissions of the potent greenhouse gas methane, building momentum as the conference prepared to shift to a more grueling two weeks of negotiations on how to avert the planet’s catastrophic warming.

Capping off two days of speeches and meetings, President Biden on Tuesday said the United States pledged to be a “partner” with vulnerable countries confronting climate change, while expressing confidence that his own domestic climate agenda is on track to pass Congress despite the wobbling of a key Senate Democrat this week.

Mr. Biden told reporters the meeting had re-established the United States as a leader on what he has called an existential threat to humanity, saying America would keep raising its climate ambitions and that his engagement on the issue had drawn thanks from other heads of state.

He also reproached President Xi Jinping of China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, along with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, for not attending the summit.

“We showed up. We showed up,” Mr. Biden said at a news conference at the United Nations summit on climate change, known as COP26, in Glasgow, Scotland. “The fact that China is trying to assert, understandably, a new role in the world as a world leader, not showing up? Huh. The single most important thing that’s gotten the attention of the world is climate.”

The most consequential agreements reached on Tuesday came in areas where Mr. Biden said the United States was poised to move aggressively: reducing methane emissions and protecting the world’s forests.

The Biden administration announced Tuesday that the Environmental Protection Agency intends to limit the methane coming from about one million existing oil and gas rigs across the United States, as part of a larger climate-focused plan to protect tropical forests and a push to speed up clean technology.

Soon after that announcement, administration officials said that 105 countries had signed the Global Methane Pledge, a commitment to reduce methane emissions 30 percent by 2030, including half of the world’s top 30 methane-emitting countries, and that they expected the list to grow.

Notably absent from those signing on, however, were some major methane polluters, like China, Russia, Australia and India.

The leaders of more than 100 countries also pledged on Tuesday to end deforestation by 2030, agreeing to a sweeping accord aimed at protecting some 85 percent of the world’s forests, which are crucial to absorbing carbon dioxide and slowing the rise in global temperatures.

Millions of acres of forests are being lost to global demand for soy, palm oil, timber and cattle, most notably in Brazil which has seen a surge in deforestation of the Amazon since President Jair Bolsonaro took office in 2019. Brazil is among the signatories of the agreement.

Boris Johnson, the British prime minister who has played host and master of ceremonies for the gathering of leaders, called countries to action on forests by invoking a horror movie. “Let’s end this great chainsaw massacre,” he said.

The plan is focused on an effort to reduce the financial incentives to cut down forests, with 12 governments committing $12 billion, and private companies pledging $7 billion, to protect and restore forests.

But some environmental organizations criticized Tuesday’s agreement, saying it would allow deforestation to continue and noting that similar efforts have failed in the past.

At an event unveiling the methane pledge, Mr. Biden and Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission and a partner in hosting the event, framed the agreement as one of the most effective ways countries around the world could quickly begin fighting the effects of climate change.

Lowering emissions of methane, which is produced from oil and natural gas operations, livestock and landfills, can warm the atmosphere 80 times as fast as carbon dioxide in the short term.

Mr. Biden said that the United States was prepared to meet the methane goal and could “probably go beyond that” by 2030.

The American Petroleum Institute, a trade group that represents the oil and natural gas industry, called the E.P.A. proposal “sweeping” and pledged to work with the agency to “help shape a final rule that is effective, feasible and designed to encourage further innovation.”

Before he left Glasgow on Tuesday to return to Washington on a late-evening flight, Mr. Biden hailed progress on multiple fronts from the second day of meetings with heads of state, including initiatives to reduce emissions from agriculture. John Kerry, Mr. Biden’s special envoy on climate change, said he expected new financial commitments to fulfill a long-delayed promise to provide $100 billion a year in aid for developing countries to fight and adapt to global warming.

There were private commitments as well: Jeff Bezos, one of the richest humans on the planet, pledged $2 billion to restore natural habitats and transform food systems to reduce their footprint and make them more sustainable in a warming world.

The pledges on Tuesday offered glimmers of some concrete progress after a pessimistic start, which included repeated warnings that the world was running out of time to solve an existential crisis for humans — along with anger from leaders of developing countries who called on wealthy countries to do more, faster, to reduce the fossil fuel emissions that are warming the planet.

Yet the hardest work at the conference will begin after the top leaders have left for home.

Over the next week and a half, diplomats will have to hammer out rules around international carbon markets and figure out how to deliver on a still-unmet promise from more than a decade ago to deliver $100 billion annually by 2020 to help poor countries pivot away from fossil fuels and prepare for the impact of climate change.

Most critically, vulnerable countries are pressing major emitting nations to agree to increase their climate targets each year in order to keep global temperatures from heading past 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to levels before the Industrial Revolution.

China, ahead of the summit, announced it would peak its emissions “before” 2030 — a target that is essentially the same as the one it issued six years ago. The country’s presence at the Glasgow conference itself has been muted. While China’s top negotiator Xie Zhenhua will be in Glasgow throughout the two-week conference, several diplomats said privately they don’t anticipate major new announcements from the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter.

At his news conference, when Mr. Biden was asked about China, he was sharp in his critique.

“I think it’s been a big mistake for China” not to show up at the conference, he said. “They’ve lost their ability to influence people around the world.”

Mr. Biden had similarly harsh words for Mr. Putin. “His tundra is burning,” Mr. Biden said. “Literally, his tundra is burning. He has serious climate problems. And he has been mum on his willingness to do anything.”

The criticisms of China from U.S. officials — including Mr. Biden’s national security adviser’s comment that the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter had “an obligation to step up” — drew a lengthy rebuke from China’s foreign ministry and some Chinese media outlets on Tuesday.

“China sticks to its word, and its actions bear fruit,” Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for the ministry, told reporters in Beijing.

Mr. Wang criticized the United States for having “constantly flipped and flopped and gone backward” on climate change, and said it should do more to support the poorer countries that have been worst hit by the consequences of global warming.

The Global Times, a pugnaciously nationalist Chinese newspaper, went further, warning that the Biden administration’s climate change promises were likely to come to nothing if Republicans regain control of Congress in midterm elections.

“If he is not qualified to lead his own country, how are he and his administration going to ‘lead’ in global climate change action?” the paper said in an editorial.

Mr. Biden said in his news conference that he expected to lead his $1.85 trillion climate change and social safety net bill climate bill through Congress and into law. He said he felt certain a key holdout, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, would ultimately vote for the bill.

“I believe that Joe will be there,” Mr. Biden said. “I think we’ll get this done”

He also said he had received thanks from other leaders for bringing the United States back to negotiations after disengagement under former President Donald J. Trump, echoing comments he made at the end of a Group of 20 meeting in Rome on Sunday.

“We showed up,” Mr. Biden said on Tuesday, shortly before returning to Washington. “And by showing up, we’ve had a profound impact.”

Reporting was contributed by Somini Sengupta and Brad Plumer in Glasgow, Christopher Buckley in Sydney, Australia, and Ivan Penn in Los Angeles.