Biden visits Amazon to shore up limited global climate record

LIMA, Peru — Joe Biden will put a bow on his environmental legacy Sunday, becoming the first sitting U.S. president to visit the Amazon — a gesture of solidarity with global efforts to confront the looming catastrophe of climate change.

But while Biden will be remembered for making climate a core part of his political and economic agenda in America, his international record has less to show for it.

"He has been able to put the U.S. in the right direction," said Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, president of the global climate talks in Peru in 2014 and now global leader of climate and energy at World Wildlife Fund.

"But this is a process that is related to the long term," he added, saying the benefits of those actions in the U.S. would take time to reverberate more widely.

Biden will touch down for just a few hours in Manaus, one of Brazil's largest cities situated along the confluence of the Negro and Amazon rivers. (Theodore Roosevelt made his mark on the region, but only after he left office.)

White House officials said Biden will meet with local and Indigenous leaders working to preserve the Amazon ecosystem. U.S. officials have previously met with Brazilian counterparts to support a multibillion-dollar effort to pay for forest protection.

His visit Sunday, sandwiched between global summits in Lima and Rio de Janeiro, comes as the nation and world prepares to move past Biden's climate agenda.

President-elect Donald Trump, who continues to call global warming a hoax, is stacking his Cabinet with officials who hope to dismantle federal programs to reduce climate pollution and expand clean energy. Half a world away in Azerbaijan, where U.N. climate talks are underway, global leaders are charting a future in which the world's second-largest polluter is poised to withdraw from international negotiations to arrest rising temperatures.

Brazil's tropical forests are not necessarily associated with a president who has tethered his climate agenda to American job creation and a domestic manufacturing revival. But they're an iconic symbol of what Biden and others are trying to protect — and what all the world stands to lose if countries don't step up.

"This has been, obviously, one of the defining causes of President Biden's presidency," national security adviser Jake Sullivan said of the visit. It would "underscore his personal commitment and America's continuing commitment at all levels of government and across our private sector and civil society to combat climate change at home and abroad."

Biden will be joined by an entourage that includes White House climate advisers Ali Zaidi and John Podesta, both of whom left the climate talks in Azerbaijan to take a victory lap with the president.

Biden made it a priority to tackle climate change from the very beginning of his presidency. On his first day in the White House, he reversed Trump's move to leave the Paris Agreement, a global pact to curb planet-warming emissions. Biden then vowed that the U.S. would slash its planet-warming pollution in half by 2030 from 2005 levels, a target that looks increasingly difficult to achieve.

"They were leading the way, both in a practical investment in the [clean energy] transition and in defending the interests of the country, but that had a positive impact overall," said Maria Mendiluce, chief executive of the We Mean Business Coalition, a an international group that backs business and government action to cut emissions.

Sweeping climate legislation — the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 and bipartisan infrastructure law of 2021 — have unlocked more than $1 trillion for clean energy technologies and the factories needed to build them.

Speaking to a roomful of business people in New York this fall, Biden said he had created a "new formula" for growth that strengthens the economy while helping cut emissions.

Those are the keys to "winning climate" at home and abroad, Biden said weeks ahead of what many supporters considered a consequential election for the planet.

Although Brazil will offer Biden an international stage to elevate climate achievements at home, he'll be limited in what he can say about global progress.

He's struggled to get foreign aid approved by a Congress that has been hostile to sending money overseas to help other countries shift from fossil fuels to clean energy. Despite pledges to step up finance, the U.S. contributes far less to global climate efforts than some European countries. At home, the U.S. is falling short of meeting his 2030 pledge to slash emissions. Biden has also overseen record breaking oil and gas production.

Trump has pledged to claw back unspent money from the IRA, further threatening Biden's environmental legacy.

"The Biden administration was a champion of climate, but was really, really much more focused on the domestic agenda than the international," said a senior executive of a climate finance institution, who was granted anonymity to offer a candid assessment of Biden's record.

Administration officials whirled through the halls of the global climate talks this week singing the praises of Biden's climate law, pointing to U.S. investments in clean power that could eventually drive down the cost of those technologies for other countries.

While the IRA is distinctly domestic, it has sparked tensions with some European allies who have seen investments shift to the U.S.

The law has also spurred green industrial policies in places such as India.

"The U.S. is a giant. It's sort of an elephant, and when it moves, it moves the whole ecosystem," said Natalie Unterstell, a climate change policy and negotiations expert from Brazil.

Biden's tough rhetoric on China, meanwhile, has often complicated climate cooperation with the world's largest emitter and threatened to slow the transition to clean energy.

Still, the two countries struck a deal ahead of last year's global climate talks that set the stage for a final agreement that included phasing down fossil fuels.

But the fierce competition between the U.S. and China could erode support for climate efforts in a Trump administration, said Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute.

"They will just look at this green competition, and they may reach a more sober and actually accurate conclusion, which is, we cannot win this race with China so let's just ditch the climate agenda entirely," he said.

As global leaders prepare to gather in Rio at a time of geopolitical upheaval and with climate negotiators headed toward a final week of tense debate, Biden's visit to one of the world's most threatened ecosystems could at least send a signal that, with or without the U.S., the climate fight needs to continue, said Pulgar-Vidal.

"The Amazon deserves some more attention," he said. "The Amazon deserves a just transition."