Vice President Kamala Harris pledged at a United Nations climate summit on Saturday that the United States would spend billions more to help developing countries combat and adapt to climate change, telling world leaders that “we are doing more “must” to limit global temperature rise.
Her comments followed an announcement by U.S. officials here earlier in the day that the federal government would for the first time require oil and gas producers to detect and fix methane leaks.
It was the most ambitious step to reduce fossil fuel emissions that President Biden’s administration is expected to unveil at the summit. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that enters the atmosphere from pipelines, drilling sites and storage facilities, dangerously accelerating global warming.
Ms. Harris made no mention of the new arrangement in her remarks, which lasted just under five minutes and came before an afternoon of side conversations with Middle Eastern leaders about the war between Israel and Hamas.
But the vice president, who arrived late to the summit after Mr. Biden decided to skip the talks, stressed what she said was nearly $1 trillion in new spending planned under the Biden administration for clean energy and climate efforts were approved. She urged world leaders to go further.
“We must have the ambition to meet this moment, accelerate our investments and lead with courage and conviction,” she said.
While they welcomed the methane announcement, many activists at the summit criticized the Biden administration for not taking further action to end the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas. The United States saw a surge in domestic oil production last year, and Mr. Biden has approved some new drilling leases that have drawn criticism from environmental groups.
“To keep global warming below internationally agreed limits, we need a fair, rapid and funded phase-out of fossil fuels,” Lorne Stockman, research director at environmental group Oil Change International, said in a statement following the announcement. “So far, none of the methane measures announced by the United States, the world’s largest oil and gas producer, have met the requirements.”
Some groups at the summit also noted the fragility of Ms. Harris’ promise that the United States would send $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund, which benefits poorer countries. In the past, Republicans have blocked U.S. funds for climate work abroad, and the Biden administration has instead tapped discretionary funding within the State Department.
Mr. Biden has failed to persuade Congress to follow through on previous climate aid promises. White House officials would not say on Saturday when or how the president would ask Congress to fund this new request, at a time when lawmakers are constrained by spending caps that Mr. Biden struck with Republicans during a fight over the The country’s borrowing limit was negotiated this year.
A formal Treasury announcement of the new commitment, which followed Ms. Harris’s comments, said the $3 billion was “subject to the availability of funds.”
The methane rule, first announced at the COP28 summit by Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael S. Regan, came with more certainty: It is an administrative measure that does not require congressional approval and is expected to take effect will occur next year.
Methane isn’t discussed in as much detail as the carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels, but it has become a rare area of progress in global talks this week.
It is the second most common greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide. Methane does not remain in the atmosphere until about a decade after it is released, but in the short term it is about 80 times more potent at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, which remains in the air for centuries.
Scientists say methane is responsible for more than a quarter of the warming the planet has experienced since the pre-industrial era. Reducing methane, he said, is crucial to achieving the global goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a target set in the Paris Agreement to prevent the worst effects of global warming and the more contentious issue of reducing carbon dioxide emissions .
The new regulation would prevent 58 million tons of methane emissions by 2038, officials said. That’s roughly equivalent to the entire carbon dioxide emissions from American coal-fired power plants in a single year. Mr. Regan called it one of the most important actions the United States has taken to slow the pace of climate change over the next decade and a half.
“I have personally met generations of family members who have been affected by this pollution for far too long,” Mr Regan said at a news conference in Dubai. “This is historic news for our climate.”
Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, an environmental group, called the policy “the most effective climate rule the United States has ever adopted in dealing with temperatures we would otherwise experience.”
But Republicans in Congress said the regulation would hurt the gas industry and also raise energy prices for Americans at home.
“Federal overreach to advance a misguided climate agenda has become a cornerstone of the Biden administration,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, said in a statement. She called the final rule “just another example of these harmful regulations.”
The fossil fuel industry has been divided over methane regulations for years. Some major international companies, including BP, expressed support for the plan, while the Independent Petroleum Producers of America, which represents small and independent oil companies, said the rule could close 300,000 of the country’s 750,000 low-producing wells, which they said called for “essential to our country’s energy production.”
Climate activists said they hoped the new U.S. rule would pave the way for further global progress in curbing methane. However, emissions are currently going in the wrong direction. According to a report from the World Meteorological Organization, methane emissions have increased over the past year.
Further commitments to reduce fossil fuel emissions were made at the conference on Saturday. Fifty oil and gas companies – including ExxonMobil; Saudi Aramco; Adnoc, the United Arab Emirates’ state-owned oil company; Conoco Phillips and BP have committed to reducing their methane emissions by 80 to 90 percent by the end of this decade.
The coalition, called the Global Decarbonization Accelerator, was the Emirates’ flagship announcement at COP28. It was denounced by 300 environmental groups who said it did not go far enough to phase out fossil fuels.
The companies represent more than 40 percent of global oil production. The pledge is voluntary, but Bloomberg Philanthropies also announced a new $40 million program to increase transparency in how companies measure and report leaks.
A separate coalition of countries, development banks and nonprofits announced a new initiative to help developing countries phase out coal. The partnership, known as the Coal Transition Accelerator, aims to provide affordable financing to poor countries that want to build renewable energy and repurpose coal infrastructure to support clean energy projects.
“The international community has a responsibility to support emerging economies in their coal phase-out strategy,” Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, said of the effort at a meeting with the leaders of Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia. “We have to change the rules of the game if we want to accelerate.”
David Gelles contributed reporting.