Biden to Speak at UN Climate Change Conference

U.S. President Joe Biden will attend the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) in Egypt on Friday.

He is expected to talk about what the U.S. has done to combat climate change at home and abroad.

However, he is likely to find that some conference delegates will not be interested in what the U.S. has done. Instead, many are more interested in what rich countries can do immediately for countries affected by environmental disasters.

Pakistan, for example, is demanding immediate compensation for the climate change-induced floods that swept through the country this year and caused tens of billions of dollars in damage.

“The anti-utopia is already knocking on our door,” Pakistani climate minister Sherry Rehman told Reuters.

In 2015, 196 signatories signed the Paris Agreement, a legally binding treaty that, among other things, committed rich countries to provide $100 billion a year to help developing countries cope with the losses and damage from climate change.

But the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development tracked the contributions and concluded that countries were not meeting that goal.