What Should Be the US’s Climate Strategy?

The issue of utmost priority for the United States (US) now, after combating Covid-19, is the climate strategy. President Joe Biden has immediately signed an executive order rejoining the US into the 2015 Paris agreement—an accord among the nations to reduce their carbon emissions to check global warming. Biden’s rejoining the agreement reflects that the US is willing to practically demonstrate that it is no longer a part of the global climate problem and rather will be part of the solution.

The US should have an impact on global climate policy, given the world’s biggest polluters like China have set a flexible and quite prolonged target of zero net carbon emission up to 2060, and other irresponsible states need to be made more conscious about climate strategy. The US can play a role to convert the Paris accord from a non-binding to a globally binding agreement with all seriousness, but first, it has to reduce its domestic carbon emissions in proportion to its population to be able to pressurise other massive polluters to achieve net zero emission within a decade. The fact remains that if the US and China set their zero emission targets decades from now, how can the rest of the world take carbon emission cuts seriously? this has to be set as an agenda before the United Nations upcoming Glasgow climate summit to be held in November where targets for the next decade will be set by the member states. The climate strategy has to be treated as an existential issue rather than made a new tool to get into tricky businesses or starting the politics of fines for massive carbon production.