Brenda Mallory reports directly to President Joe Biden, but in a crowded building at Expo City in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, no one recognizes her. Mallory is the chair of the Council on Environmental Quality, a White House division responsible for implementing some of Biden’s key climate priorities, and she is advancing that agenda as the annual United Nations climate conference draws to a close.
On Saturday, she sits on a couch in the middle of a busy hallway and listens intently to KM Reyes, a community organizer and conservation lobbyist in the Philippines. With a notebook balanced on her lap, Mallory wants to hear what the US can do to help grassroots advocates like Reyes. “I’m big on details,” she tells her.
“It ensures that we get real financing on the ground,” Reyes replies. “Because we are nowhere near the target of $20 billion by 2025 to fulfill the framework,” she adds, referring to a global biodiversity agreement signed last year.
Finances are an overarching concern at COP28, as the conference, and its predecessor meetings, are shortened. Global climate and environmental agreements recognize that the planet faces disasters mainly due to carbon pollution by countries that industrialized relatively early in their history – such as the United States – as opposed to those whose economies began to develop more recently, such as the Philippines.
Consequently, developed countries’ obligations to provide financial support to developing countries are at the heart of climate agreements. As the world’s largest historical polluter, the US is expected to provide its fair share of support for climate efforts, but it has failed to do so in recent years. For example, only $2 billion of the $3 billion the US pledged to a climate fund in 2014 has been delivered. Nevertheless, a few days before Mallory’s arrival in Dubai, Vice President Kamala Harris pledged another $3 billion to the same fund.
But looming over these pledges are questions about a divided Congress’ ability to carry out US funding commitments, as well as the very real possibility that former President Donald Trump will defeat Biden in an election next year, throwing US climate policy into disarray. After all, one of Trump’s signature policies was withdrawing the US from the landmark Paris Agreement limit global warming.
Get caught up on COP28
That tension was evident during COP28. On the very first day, negotiators made the unprecedented decision to a so-called loss and damage fund to provide financing to developing countries facing the catastrophic effects of warming that has already occurred. While the United Arab Emirates and Germany each pledged $100 million, the US has been roundly criticized for committing only $17.5 million, an amount that advocates for climate justice. described as “poor” and “disgraceful”.
Without explicitly mentioning the responsibility of the US, Reyes emphasized the need for developing countries to receive funding. Just $50,000 could go a long way toward protecting 100,000 hectares of carbon-dense forests in the Philippines, she told Mallory. “It’s a drop in the bucket for global engagement, but it’s going to be completely transformative,” she said.
Mallory nodded along with scribbled notes. Later, Mallory told me that “everyone appreciates that none of this is going to happen unless we figure out mechanisms to fund it.”
Mallory is one of several high-ranking US officials attending COP28 to tout the achievements of the Biden administration, and she is in Dubai for three days “to highlight the work we’re doing that supports the president’s climate change agenda ,” she said. Grist spent half a day with Mallory as she moderated panels on the administration’s climate initiatives, spoke to the press and recorded a video with a young ocean justice activist.
Mallory promoted two major American initiatives on Saturday. That morning she announced that the US would join a international partnership promoting nature-based climate solutions, such as tree planting and mangrove protection. (Healthy ecosystems can remove carbon from the atmosphere, and they can also function as natural infrastructure that protects landscapes from climate-driven impacts such as flooding.) Later, she moderated an event on a Biden administration conservation initiative called America the Beautifulwhereby the president outlined ways to preserve 30 percent of the country’s land and water by 2030. (The connection is in line with the so-called 30 by 30 goal (codified in an international agreement signed by many other countries, but the US Congress has never ratified that convention.)
But while Mallory was touting the president’s initiatives, a group of Republican lawmakers were meeting with world leaders and to emphasize their country’s position as one of the world’s leading fossil fuel producers. Earlier in the week, Republicans fired off statements condemning them Vice President Harris’ commitment to provide $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund, the largest international fund to support climate projects in developing countries.
“I am appalled that the Biden administration will pledge billions more in taxpayer money, money Congress hasn’t even provided, to another bloated, mismanaged and ineffective slush fund that will do nothing to change the temperature of the planet,” said representative. Mario Díaz-Balart, a Republican from Florida and chairman of an Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations, which has jurisdiction over international climate spending.
Meanwhile, reporters at the media center found postcards bearing the acronym IRA, a reference to the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark 2021 US law expected to reduce the nation’s carbon emissions by about 45 percent, which puts Paris Agreement targets within reach. The postcard rebranded the IRA as “Irresponsible Reckless Alarmism” and included a QR code linked to a report by Republican lawmakers titled “IRA Will Make United States Poorer and China Richer.”
“It’s so hard when you’re dependent on Congress actually coming to support exactly what you’re doing,” Mallory said. “What I personally hope is that when people see the efforts to meet the commitments that we are making on dollars, combined with the other actions that we are also doing, that you see it as a package.”
Coons is chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations. His comments refer to $1.5 billion in climate funding that Congress appropriated last year, which led to the US contributing an additional $1 billion to the Green Climate Fund earlier this year. The contribution came after years of US disengagement from the Paris Agreement and international climate finance during the Trump administration, and it highlighted the domestic challenges US administrations face in meeting climate commitments.
Such complexities are of little comfort to those in developing countries.
“I just don’t care,” said Harjeet Singh, the head of global political strategy at the international environmental group Climate Action Network. “For decades, the United States has hidden its lack of true political commitment behind the veil of complex domestic politics.”
The US government should have worked to inform its citizens about the country’s historical responsibility for causing and exacerbating the climate crisis, he said: “This negligence towards its international duties exacerbates the plight of vulnerable communities and developing countries, which the bear the brunt of a crisis. they did little to create.”
