Climate Week NYC: news and protests surrounding the UN Climate Ambition Summit

They’ve agreed on five goals for both countries, including mitigating the impact of clean energy and digital economic transitions on workers and harnessing new technologies, like artificial intelligence, to benefit those workers.

There are still no specifics on how they will develop this partnership and reach those goals, but they want to take the initiative to other international forums and allow other nations and organizations to join.

Joe Biden and heads of state for many of the top polluting countries — China, India, and Russia, and the UK — were missing at the UN Climate Ambition Summit, where the ticket to participate was a more ambition climate plan. “The rich countries that have historically driven the climate crisis and are continuing to expand fossil fuels were given an opportunity ... to demonstrate their commitment to the 1.5°C global warming limit. Instead, we saw cowardice and a staggering failure of climate leadership,” Romain Ioualalen of Oil Change International said in a statement.

During the UN climate summit today, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva announced that Brazil will recommit to cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 48 percent by 2025. The country initially pledged to do that under the Paris agreement, but former president Jair Bolsonaro reversed course.

Deforestation in Brazil has also dropped by 48 percent this year, Lula said. Under Bolsonaro, deforestation created 122 percent more carbon dioxide emissions in two years than the average recorded between 2010 and 2018.

The Paris agreement, while committing countries to limit global warming, doesn’t actually use the term “fossil fuel.” The world needs a treaty on the non-proliferation of fossil fuels, Lidy Nacpil of the Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development said during the opening plenary of the United Nations Climate Ambition Summit taking place today. The non-proliferation treaty’s supporters based it on the same principles as the 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

A civilian climate corps was a key ask youth climate activists had of Biden while he was still on the campaign trail in 2020. Today, during NYC’s Climate Week, the Biden administration announced that it’s launching a new American Climate Corps, a job training program for careers in clean energy and conservation.

We’re still waiting for more details on how the program will work and where the funds will come from. But starting today, people can sign up to “learn more” about the Corps, according to White House officials.

The Verge saw NYPD fill at least three police vans with protesters who marched through NYC’s financial district to end fossil fuels. Demonstrators are still blocking entrances to the bank, and there are more arrests going down.

“It’s not just a country issue. It’s a whole world issue,” says Diana Sanchez, a coordinator with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, who joined the march. “You have hurricanes, you have natural disasters, and it causes people to migrate over. And then they come to this country in search of work, and then they overheat while they’re working ... So it was very important for us to be here representing all the voices that are not being heard.”

Edward Norton, Jane Fonda, Mark Ruffalo, Rosario Dawson, Alyssa Milano, Marisa Tomei, and Alicia Silverstone are among the actors who joined some 700 activists and organizations that signed a letter urging President Joe Biden to phase out fossil fuels. The letter comes ahead of a ‘March to End Fossil Fuels’ and a United Nations Climate Ambition Summit in New York City next week. “You have the executive authority to stop approving fossil fuel projects, phase out fossil fuel production on federal lands, and halt oil and gas exports,” the letter says.