“Our country is deeply invested in a partnership with all the nations of the Caribbean. Our search for growth, jobs, affordable supplies of energy, fight against transnational crime, protection of climate — all these issues have no respect for borders.
— JOE BIDEN, 2013
The election of Joseph R. Biden as president of the United States is widely viewed in the Caribbean community as a positive as the president-elect has pledged to focus on climate change and beating COVID-19 — issues that are paramount to our region.
Under the Trump administration, there has been a lack of leadership in both areas; Trump dismissed climate change as a hoax.
His focus on dismantling environmental advancements was counter to what we in the region need.
Citing “draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposed on America”, Trump in 2017 announced that America was withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, which outlines and focuses on the global response to climate change.
Biden has promised that the United States will re-enter the accord on the first day of his presidency. The president-elect intends to sign an executive order to reverse Trump’s policies and go beyond the Obama-Biden administration platform to put America “on the right track”.
Biden plans to ensure the US achieves 100 percent clean energy economy and reaches net-zero emissions no later than 2050.
In a recent interview with National Review, former attorney general Alfred Sears, a self-described regionalist, said, “I think that Biden’s declared, and certainly his ideological commitment to climate resilience gives us an opportunity to tie a major foreign policy, national security, national development imperative of The Bahamas and of the Caribbean, to a major plank of his administration.”
In the region, we are uniquely situated in experiencing the negative impact of climate change and as small island developing states, we are all mostly tourism and agrarian-based economies.
Climate change will impact us first. It will destroy us first. It will economically affect us first.
“The Trump administration, which had started the proceedings of disengaging with the Paris agreement, really was very detrimental, not just for us in the region, but globally because it signaled that dealing with climate change wasn’t something important,” noted Dr. Adelle Thomas, director of the Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience Research Centre at the University of The Bahamas.
“The US being one of the major emitters of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change and not being a part of the Paris agreement, it made a lot of other countries not think that, ‘OK, I need to step up to the plate’, that we need to reduce our emissions as well. So, they weren’t setting a good example by coming out of the Paris agreement.”
Thomas said Biden’s commitments on climate change “send a signal that we will be able to limit emissions to levels that we need to in order to prevent the impacts of climate change from becoming as bad as they could be, which is very important for small island developing states like us here in The Bahamas”.
Under the Paris agreement, the goal is to keep the rise in a global temperature this century below two degrees Celsius and make efforts to limit the temperature rise even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Thomas said even at that level of warming, we face existential threats as a result of climate change.
“So, having the United States back as part of the Paris agreement means that it is more likely that we will be able as a group of nations to keep temperatures at that limit, which is definitely beneficial for The Bahamas,” she said.
Thomas added, “In terms of beyond the Paris agreement, I think the new Biden administration is going to be very beneficial for The Bahamas.
“We will likely see some funding that will be available for climate change adaptation and mitigation that really wasn’t there under the Trump administration. The Trump administration really drew back on any funding. They didn’t want you to use climate change on any type of grant applications.
“USAID (the United States Agency for International Development) that had provided funding throughout the region for climate change was really restricted in what they could do. And so, I think with the Biden administration we’ll be able to have more bilateral funding from the US for climate change adaptation and mitigation within the region that we can capitalize on.”
Biden has pledged to rally the rest of the world to meet the threat of climate change, noting “there is no greater challenge facing our economy and our world”.
He will not only recommit the United States to the Paris Agreement on climate change – he will go much further than that, according to “The Biden Plan For Clean Energy Revolution And Environmental Justice”.
“He will lead an effort to get every major country to ramp up the ambition of their domestic climate targets. He will make sure those commitments are transparent and enforceable, and stop countries from cheating by using America’s economic leverage and power of example.”
Biden has pledged to make a federal investment of $1.7 trillion over the next 10 years, leveraging additional private sector and state and local investments to total more than $5 trillion.
Thomas said America’s leadership on this critical issue is important.
“We’ve experienced the impacts of Dorian and we’ve seen that climate change is having an effect on those extreme events, but I think now with this renewed support and leadership that the US will provide, we need to expand our focus on climate change to beyond hurricanes,” she told National Review.
“We need to look at greening our economy on renewable energy. We need to look at coming up with a national adaptation plan to say holistically how we’re going to deal with climate change, and I think we’re going to benefit greatly from having an idea from the types of climate change work that we want to do and then be able to tap into some of the freed up resources that I think will be available under the Biden administration.”
COVID-19
Thomas also noted that COVID-19 is exposing some of the same vulnerabilities related to climate change such as our reliance on tourism and the urgent need for improved food security.
Biden’s election has signaled a decisive change in America’s approach to fighting the pandemic and has provided some confidence globally that the US intends to be more serious in battling COVID-19.
The president-elect wants the United States to rejoin the World Health Organization (WHO) and has pledged to make COVID-19 a priority item on his agenda.
Trump’s decision to withdraw the US from the WHO was widely seen as hampering the global fight against COVID. Trump blamed the organization for failing to be tougher on China at the start of the novel coronavirus outbreak, although he himself had praised China’s actions in fighting the virus.
The turning point in the US’ handling of COVID-19 is cause for optimism.
In a congratulatory message to the president-elect and vice president-elect, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley said, “I am sure that we in the Caribbean will look forward with optimism to working with the new administration to confront a number of global issues, from the awful pandemic to the climate crisis to the pursuit of racial justice.”
Over the course of months, President Trump has publicly downplayed COVID-19, and even after testing positive in October, he held large rallies where many did not wear masks and were not encouraged to.
Ahead of the recent election, the White House listed “ending the COVID-19 pandemic” as one of Trump’s accomplishments. In recent days, at least a dozen US states reported daily record increases in COVID-19.
In one of his first acts after the election was called in his favor, Biden formed a 12-member COVID-19 task force and has pledged an aggressive response to COVID-19.
The Bahamas and the region will benefit directly from any strides made by the Biden administration in dealing with the pandemic, which has wreaked havoc on economies across the Caribbean and indeed the world.
Biden has promised a “decisive public health response [to COVID-19] that ensures the wide availability of free testing; the elimination of all cost barriers to preventative care and treatment for COVID-19; the development of a vaccine; and the full deployment and operation of necessary supplies, personnel and facilities”.
Tourism accounts for 50 percent of our GDP and 85 percent of tourists who visit The Bahamas come from North America.
While our economy has reopened, we cannot bank on any meaningful progress as long as the United States remains gripped by the pandemic.
This applies to our tourism-dependent region also.
Other considerations
While we have highlighted these two important issues as being of utmost importance to the region, we do not mean to suggest that the Biden-Harris election does not have other important implications for the region.
During the Obama administration, there was a crackdown on so-called tax havens.
Congress passed the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), which requires foreign financial institutions and certain other non-financial foreign entities to report on the foreign assets held by their US account holders.
This has placed greater reporting requirements on financial institutions in The Bahamas.
Alicia Nicholls, a trade and development consultant with a keen interest in sustainable development, international law and trade, noted that an unknown is where Biden stands on the issue of offshore international financial centers.
In an article on the Caribbean Trade Law and Development site, Nicholls also observed that, “…While it is hoped that VP Harris’ Caribbean ancestry might have a modulating influence on the administration’s engagement with the Caribbean, it is important for the region to remember first of all that she is an American first.”
On another note, it will be interesting to see how our relationship develops with the Biden administration in relation to China, which has made increased investments in The Bahamas and across our region.
It would be advisable if the Caribbean would see the wisdom of approaching the Biden administration from a united position instead of unilaterally, on issues of shared interest, as it has done previously with other US administrations.
This would include the COVID crisis, unemployment and immigration reform.
Biden has a past history of having shown a real interest in conducting discussions with the Caribbean and Latin America.
Following a meeting with CARICOM leaders in Trinidad and Tobago in 2013, the then US vice president was quoted as saying, “In economics, security and energy, the nations of the Caribbean would go faster and further when they not only work with you (the US), but when they work together.”
The post In Biden, an ally on climate change and COVID fight appeared first on The Nassau Guardian.
source https://thenassauguardian.com/in-biden-an-ally-on-climate-change-and-covid-fight/
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