Joe Biden will bring US back into Paris Agreement on climate change as a state that believes science is important – Dr Richard Dixon

This time next year we will (hopefully) just have come to the end of the Glasgow climate talks, COP26.

US President-elect Joe Biden has pledged that America will rejoin the Paris Agreement on climate change under his leadership (Picture: Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty)

They will have certainly run late on the Friday, may well have talked through Saturday and may even have finished things only on Sunday. Important agreements should have been made about how to deliver on the targets in the 2015 Paris Agreement. Major commitments should have been made on funding the fight to reduce emissions and help countries cope with the changing climate. The role of the United States will have been crucial, as it always is, for good or bad.

The US was instrumental in creating the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 under George Bush Snr. They were huge blockers of a deal in 2000 under instructions from his son as President-Elect, so much so that an unprecedented follow-up meeting had to be held six months later. I shall never forget being in the plenary hall as respectable delegates from the world’s nations booed the US chief negotiator when she tried to claim the US had engaged constructively.

Donald Trump won the 2016 election on the second day of the two-week climate talks in Marrakech. President Obama sent his Secretary of State John Kerry to reassure us all that the Democrats would make sure Trump wouldn’t follow through on his promise to pull the US out of the Paris Agreement. They failed but ironically it takes four years to leave the Agreement so the US only officially left the day after the current US election.

President Obama came to the climate talks in Copenhagen in 2009 and Joe Biden may well come to the talks in Glasgow next November. It will be his first chance, in his first year, to show that he wants to be seen as a leader on climate change, bringing the US back into the family of nations.

Biden’s campaign included a detailed climate and energy plan. There is a specific promise to take the US back into the Paris Agreement and, in the last few days, he has said that will be one of his first priorities when he takes office.

After a bit of a shaky start, climate change became a central plank of Biden’s election platform. The plan also has a lot about a $2-trillion boost for clean energy, and promises to set a national goal of net-zero emissions by 2050, although it was not quite brave enough to commit to the other half of the equation – actually reducing fossil fuel extraction.

Increased wildfires in California, like this one near Concord, have been linked to climate change and may weigh heavily on US President-elect Joe Biden's mind (Picture: Brittany Hosea-Small/AFP via Getty Images)

The Democrats control the House of Representatives but the balance of members of the Senate is still to be decided, with the betting currently favouring the Republicans. So Biden may have only limited power to deliver on the big promises on energy and climate. Even so, the US will be back at the UN talks as a state which now believes that scientific evidence is important, and that’s got to make a big difference.

The US will need to put forward a 2030 climate plan before the Glasgow talks, and this will show how serious the new administration is about urgent and fundamental changes to climate emissions.

Dr Richard Dixon is director of Friends of the Earth Scotland

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