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- 105 world leaders agreed to cut methane emissions by 30% by 2030 at the UN climate summit.
- US special climate envoy John Kerry said countries will be held to their pledge through "peer pressure."
- Biden had previously expressed the urgency for the US to take the lead on fighting the climate crisis.
A number of world leaders gathered in Scotland this past weekend to discuss strategies to fight the climate crisis and agreed to cut methane emissions significantly – a key step in reducing global warming.
US special climate envoy John Kerry knows the key to ensuring those world leaders honor their promise to reduce powerful gas emissions.
"We have incredible accountability through satellite measurements," Kerry told Axios reporters in Glasgow. "And in most of this, it's peer pressure and public scrutiny and humiliation and other things that act as incentives."
On Tuesday, 105 world leaders signed a Global Methane Pledge that would cut methane emissions by 30% by 2030. Kerry said on Tuesday that methane is "20 to 80 times more destructive" than carbon dioxide, and on the same day, President Joe Biden unveiled the plan for the US to honor its pledge in reducing those emissions.
"It's going to improve health, reduce asthma, respiratory-related emergencies," Biden said during remarks on Tuesday. "It's going to improve the food supply as well by cutting crop losses and related ground-level pollution. And it's going to boost our economies, saving companies money, reducing methane leaks, capturing methane to turn it into new revenue streams, as well as creating good-paying union jobs for our workers."
This is the first climate summit the US has taken part of since President Donald Trump's term, and Biden had previously expressed the need to show the country's commitment to fighting the climate crisis on the world stage.
"The prestige of the United States is on the line," Biden told a group of progressive lawmakers last month, according to California Rep. Ro Khanna. "I need this to go represent the United States overseas. I need people to see that the Democratic Party is working, that the country is working, that we can govern."
Just before leaving for Glasgow, Biden unveiled his $1.75 trillion social-spending proposal, including $555 billion for the climate - the largest investment in the proposal - that he was able to tout to world leaders. The framework is not final, though, and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin has yet to sign off on the plan, and the climate proposals within it.
Manchin opposed the inclusion of the Clean Electricity Performance Program (CEPP) in Democrats' original $3.5 trillion proposal, which would have allowed for Biden to reach his goal to cut carbon emissions in half by 2030.
As the United Nations has made clear, these investments cannot wait. World leaders set a goal to keep global warming from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, but a recent UN report found that unless action is taken quickly, temperatures could rise to about 2.7 degrees Celsius by then. This prompted UN Secretary-General António Guterres to call out countries for "utterly failing" to meet climate goals, saying world leaders needed to work to avoid a "climate catastrophe."