John Kerry, the country’s climate envoy, was expected to announce the carbon offset plan on Wednesday. Payments from companies would go to countries struggling to adopt renewable energy.
Excerpt from this New York Times story:
The Biden administration wants corporations to fund renewable energy projects in developing countries in a way that allows the companies to count resulting cuts in greenhouse gases against their own climate goals.
John Kerry, President Biden’s climate envoy, intends to announce on Wednesday a program that his advisers say could inject tens of billions of private dollars into the economies of developing countries struggling to replace coal, oil and gas with wind, solar and other renewable power.
The program, known in climate circles as a carbon offset plan, is the product of months of discussions between Mr. Kerry and major corporations as well as philanthropic groups like the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bezos Earth Fund, according to several people involved in the talks who were not authorized to discuss them publicly.
“We need to increase finance by orders of magnitude from what it is now,” said Nathaniel Keohane, the president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, an environmental group that is supporting the plan.
But the initiative has been met with skepticism from some European nations and by the United Nations secretary general’s staff because they felt the plan lacked details and was rushed, according to multiple people familiar with the discussions.
Some influential environmental groups in the United States that were briefed by the State Department on the strategy, including the Natural Resources Defense Council and the World Resources Institute, were not supporting the plan either because they feared it could actually undermine efforts to drive down global emissions to zero, activists said.
Activists said that, as other nations are stepping up to offer public money to grapple with climate change, the Biden administration, facing the prospect of Republicans making gains in Tuesday’s midterm elections and blocking new appropriations, has stayed silent about any plans to deliver funding.
