COP28 | Joe Biden absent in Dubai

(Washington) US President Joe Biden will not attend the annual meeting of international climate negotiations, which will take place this week in Dubai in the presence of heads of state and diplomats from around 200 countries and the Vatican.

The White House announced that it would instead send a “team” of climate specialists, including its special envoy John Kerry, its climate adviser Ali Zaidi and its clean energy adviser John Podesta.

“While we have no new information to share regarding the president’s travels at this time, the administration looks forward to a strong and productive COP28,” said Angelo Fernández Hernández, a White House spokesperson. adding that Mr. Biden’s team would continue to build on the actions taken by the administration “to combat the climate crisis.”

Mr. Biden also pledged to visit Africa by the end of the year, but clearly that trip won’t happen either. The White House has not provided any official explanation, but the president’s agenda has been heavily occupied by handling the war in Ukraine and the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

The president also had to spend a lot of time on internal issues, such as financing the federal government, which was a hot issue in Congress.

COP28 is a two-week conference that begins Thursday and is convened each year by the United Nations.

COP stands for “Conference of the Parties,” meaning it is made up of the nations that agreed to a framework on climate change drawn up by the UN in 1992. It has taken place 28 times, This is why this year it is called “COP28”.

Countries that signed the agreement pledged to work to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions and prevent human activities that are “dangerous” to the climate system. Their goal is to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, which contribute to global warming.

This year, the United Arab Emirates, the world’s fifth largest oil producer, is hosting the negotiations. Conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East could make cooperation between nations even more difficult.

And Sultan al-Jaber was named president-designate, a move heavily criticized by climate activists because he is the chief executive officer of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Corporation, which seeks to increase its crude oil production.

Mr. Biden called climate change “the ultimate threat to humanity.”

Earlier in November, he released an assessment of the state of climate change in the United States, warning that the problem was affecting all regions of the country.

“Not just some, all of them,” he insisted.

Since the beginning of his term, the United States passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which contained the strongest American response to combat climate change.

This law aims, among other things, to stimulate the production of clean energy on a scale that will reduce the impact of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.