Wall Street banks such as Citigroup Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. have pledged to achieve net-zero emissions. That requires a focus on cutting emissions first, before using offsets to neutralize any pollution that still remains. Doing so usually requires costly structural changes.
President Joe Biden is pushing for the U.S. to take more aggressive climate action. He’s expected to announce a 2030 pollution reduction goal next month that will align with efforts to keep average global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degree Celsius from pre-industrial levels, according to two people familiar with the matter.
That’s the most-ambitious target under the Paris Agreement. The U.S. government is convening a summit with the world’s top carbon emitters on April 22, with hopes of driving more ambitious emissions-reductions and climate-finance commitments.
Since taking office, Biden has sought to convince other world leaders that the U.S. is firmly back in the global fight against climate change, after it pulled back under President Donald Trump. Hashing out definitions of green financing will be a key part of discussions at international climate talks scheduled for November in Glasgow, Scotland.
The Biden administration’s green finance framework should start to take shape by June, when leaders of the Group of Seven countries are due to meet in southwest England, the people said. U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government also wants carbon leakage to be on the agenda.
“Raising ambition as we go to Glasgow is so critical,” U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry said earlier this month at CERAWeek by IHS Markit.
In Glasgow, “we will meet with the nations that met in Paris to hold the earth’s temperature hopefully to no larger than a 1.5 degrees Celsius increase,” Kerry said. “Our hope is that by keeping 1.5 degrees alive in the next 10 years, we lay the groundwork for the exciting venture of transitioning to clean energy.”
The U.S. and Europe could have an identical set of rules that determine what counts as green investment, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told Kerry in Paris this month. The EU is due to propose a regulation on the so-called taxonomy in April.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said she will create a “climate hub” within Treasury to address Biden’s “whole-of-government” approach toward climate change. The hub will be overseen by a senior adviser who is expected to report directly to Yellen, one of the people said.
A Treasury climate “czar” hasn’t been announced. Sarah Bloom Raskin, a former Federal Reserve official who served in the Treasury Department during the Obama administration, was under consideration for the post, Bloomberg News reported last month.