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U.S. President Joe Biden visits Raj Ghat memorial with Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi and other G20 leaders.
G20 achieves consensus, but stays cool on climate and Ukraine
The G20 summit in New Delhi wrapped up this weekend, with many praising Indian PM Narendra Modi for getting the G20 nations to agree on a consensus declaration after a month of intense negotiations.
What was agreed to? On climate, member nations agreed “that developing countries need to be supported in their transitions to low carbon/emissions" though it’s not exactly clear what this financing would look like. “Climate justice” remains a contentious issue, as evidenced by Modi’s comments earlier in the week accusing Western nations of forcing the developing world to pay the price for their rapid industrialization.
The G20 declaration also comes just days after the first Africa Climate Summit, where African states pitched themselves as the future of the green economy. In a further testament to the growing importance of Africa, Modi later announced the admission of the African Union as a permanent member of the G20.
But the biggest challenge to consensus was Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine and the divide between many Western states and countries in the Global South that want to maintain solid ties with both the US and Russia. While the declaration recognized “the human suffering and negative added impacts of the war in Ukraine with regard to global food and energy security,” – a nod to African nations that have seen supplies disrupted by the conflict – Kyiv was furious that the statement didn’t directly address Russian atrocities.
Indeed, this was a significant departure from the G20’s consensus declaration last year in Bali, which referenced “Russian aggression” and described the conflict as a war “against” Ukraine, not “in” it. And despite the absence of President Putin at the summit, Moscow was notably pleased with the outcome: Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov praised the declaration, calling it "a step in the right direction.”
A win for Modi? One thing many observers agree on, however, was that the summit achieved India’s goal of boosting its global diplomatic bonafides, in part aimed at countering China’s influence in Asia and Africa. It helped, of course, that Xi Jinping also chose to stay home.
What We're Watching: Biden on tour
Biden's Euro trip. President Joe Biden is on a crucial Euro trip. It began in Rome at the G-20 Summit, where his idea for a global minimum tax rate was broadly endorsed by the group. Biden also visited Pope Francis at the Vatican – a get-together that produced decidedly less scary photos than when his predecessor held a papal visit – and met with France's President Emmanuel Macron to try to smooth over strained relations after the AUKUS debacle, which he now says had been "clumsy." The US president also had a face-to-face with Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, just a week after Ankara threatened to expel the US ambassador. But there's a domestic component at play too: Biden was hoping to have passed two infrastructure bills, which include money for climate change, before he attended the COP26 meeting in Glasgow, which kicked off this weekend. Failure to close the deal on Capitol Hill would deal Biden's credibility a heavy blow just at the moment he wants to reinforce the US commitment to climate change reduction goals at this week's summit and to claim, yet again, that America is indeed back! But Democrats continue to wrangle over both what's in the bills and how to pay for them. Meanwhile, only a third of Americans now say that the US is headed in the right direction. Biden was hoping to have the wind at his back as he sailed into Europe. Instead, he is facing a strong political headwind.
UN environment chief: G-20 can practically fix climate on its own
How can we go from "fine words" to "fine deeds" at the upcoming COP26 climate summit in Glasgow? For Inger Andersen, head of the UN Environment Program, it's actually quite simple. The world's top 20 economies, she says, are responsible for over three-quarters of global carbon emissions, so if they "make the requisite shifts, frankly we are out of the climate crisis." Watch her interview with Ian Bremmer on the upcoming episode of GZERO World.