The U.S. and Canada are poised to take new strides in addressing climate change during this week’s state visit by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada to the White House, including the next steps in meeting December’s climate change deal in Paris.
“There is a nice alignment between a Canadian prime minister who wants to get all sorts of things done right off the bat and an American president who is thinking about the legacy he is going to leave in his last year in office,” Trudeau said Monday during a forum hosted by the Huffington Post.
Trudeau said climate change is one of the issues “important to him and to me.”
Todd Stern, the U.S.’s senior climate negotiator, said the meeting is important to ensure leadership is demonstrated at next month’s signing of the global climate change deal at United Nations headquarters in New York.
“We must show global leadership by signing the agreement on April 22,” Stern told reporters on a call Tuesday. “And we want to both join the agreement — actually become parties to the agreement later this year — and we’re encouraging others to do the same.”
The Paris deal is nonbinding but places 196 countries on track to boost clean energy and reduce fossil fuel use to keep the Earth’s temperature from rising above 2 degrees Celsius in the next few decades. Republicans have criticized the deal for making heavy-handed regulations driven by the Environmental Protection Agency a key part of the U.S. meeting its obligations under the deal.
The week’s discussions also will include the U.S. and Canada’s adoption of an amendment to the Montreal Protocol, an agreement founded in the prevailing decades to save the Earth’s protective ozone layer from harmful hydroflourocarbons found in aerosols.
The countries support the amendment to the treaty that “could reduce as much as 90 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent” emissions through the middle of the century. Stern said the amendment is “essential” to meeting the goal of the Paris climate change agreement.
A third aspect of cooperation between the two nations will be adopting a global market-based system for lowering greenhouse gas emissions from commercial jet aircraft, Stern said. Many scientists blame greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels for driving manmade climate change.
Stern also said they hope to work more closely on emission regulations for the oil and gas sector, particularly methane emission regulations that the U.S. is developing. Vehicle emission rules and building electricity sector infrastructure are other areas where cooperation will be sought, he said.
Much has gone into the three-day meeting between the two heads of state on energy and climate change issues in recent weeks.
Trudeau’s climate change minister, Catherine McKenna, visited Washington late last month for a round of meetings with senior Cabinet officials, including Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy and Interior Secretary Sally Jewell.
She also met with Stern to discuss maintaining momentum on the Paris deal, as well as Trudeau’s plan for creating a nationwide framework to address climate change.
She talked to Jewell about the “two countries’ shared responsibilities for protected areas and wildlife,” according to a readout from the Canadian embassy in Washington. The shared responsibilities include the joint Canada-U.S. Migratory Birds Convention, which celebrates its 100th anniversary this year, the embassy notes.
With McCarthy, she signed an agreement to work on water quality issues on the Great Lakes, specifically to stop algae blooms that can harm drinking water.
On Feb. 12, the energy ministers of the U.S., Canada and Mexico signed a joint climate change memo, “which will expand the energy relationship between the three countries,” a readout says.
“This agreement will see Canada, Mexico and the United States collaborate and share information on key areas such as low-carbon electricity; clean energy technologies; energy efficiency; carbon capture, use and storage; climate change adaptation; and reducing emissions from the oil and gas sector, including from methane.”
