Client Alert: COP27 Update #4 (The Biden Edition)
President Biden touched down in Sharm El-Sheikh Egypt today and after meeting with Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi, who is hosting the conference, he sought to assure the leaders at COP27 that the US was serious about confronting climate change, but he met with a mixed reaction.
The fact that Biden came to Egypt was recognized as critically important in raising the profile of the convening and the bi-partisan US congressional delegation brought a broad view set of ideas that included not only solar and wind but also nuclear and natural gas. Biden touted new proposals that included requirements for all major federal contractors to set targets for reducing their emissions in line with the 2015 Paris climate accord (GreenGen is an impacted energy contractor to the US government), and for oil and gas operations to better monitor and fix leaks that cause emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas (GreenGen is developing a carbon offset methodology with Verra/VCS to address this very issue). Both of these proposals have our full support and are positive in nature.
But “loss and damage” remains a key issue for many countries. Poorer countries have been pushing for government money, and Friday one of their top representatives in Egypt suggested that rich nations should pass new taxes to help. Munir Akram, the chief climate negotiator for the largest bloc of developing nations, told The Washington Post that he “wholeheartedly” supports the idea of taxing fossil fuel companies to pay for “loss and damage” — the irreversible harms from climate change that are already bombarding the developing world.
The source of capital remains a key challenge given the economic challenges in the world and the historically high interest rates. The key US financing proposal to-date focuses on how to aggregate private sector capital to help address climate change rather than large sums of public dollars.
We expect that this will be a key issue as we move into the second week of the COP27.
