During a landmark visit to the Amazon rainforest on Sunday, President Joe Biden highlighted his climate legacy, declaring that no one can reverse America’s green transition as President-elect Donald Trump’s fossil-friendly policies loom large.
Biden is the first sitting U.S. president to visit the world’s largest tropical rainforest, which plays a vital role in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere but is under growing threat from climate change.
During an aerial tour from his Marine One helicopter, Biden saw dried-up riverbeds, eroded shores and plumes of smoke from the Amazon’s worst forest fires in two decades, which have burned millions of acres this year and greatly disrupted life for its Indigenous communities.
Speaking afterward at the Museum of the Amazon in Manaus, Brazil, Biden said the fight against climate change had been a “defining cause” of his presidency. He cited the Inflation Reduction Act he signed in 2022, which together with other legislation provides $450 billion in clean energy funding, he said, as well as creating hundreds of thousands of jobs and positioning the United States to cut its carbon emissions in half by 2030.
Biden also said Sunday that the U.S. had surpassed his goal of delivering $11 billion per year in climate financing to developing countries by 2024, a more than six-fold increase from when Biden took over from Trump in 2021. This makes the U.S. the largest bilateral provider of climate finance in the world, the White House said.
Biden began his term by bringing the U.S. back into the Paris Agreement, an international treaty on climate change that his predecessor, Trump, had withdrawn from. Trump, a climate change skeptic, has said he will withdraw from the agreement again as well as loosen restrictions on oil and gas exploration.
Without mentioning Trump by name, Biden said he had left his successor and country a “strong foundation to build on, if they choose to do so.”
While some may seek to delay the country’s green transition, “nobody can reverse it, nobody,” Biden said, “not when so many people, regardless of party or politics, are enjoying its benefits.”
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