G-20 live updates: Vaccine inequities ‘morally unacceptable,’ Italian PM says

Warning of food and water shortages and mass-scale migration, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson compared the trajectory of the planet to the Roman Empire while flying to the G-20 summit in Rome.

“When things start to go wrong, they can go wrong at extraordinary speed,” Johnson told reporters. “And you saw that with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire and, I’m afraid to say, it’s true today, that unless we get this right in tackling climate change, we could see our civilization, our world, also go backwards."

Johnson has a crucial role to play in the next weeks, because immediately after the G-20 summit, his country is playing host to an international climate conference seen as one of the last conceivable moments to limit the catastrophic effects of climate change. The G-20 gathering could kick-start — or diminish — momentum for that event, as the G-20 group accounts for some 80 percent of global emissions.

During the two-day meeting in Rome, leaders are expected to talk about a series of climate topics, including ways to reduce methane emissions and targets for phasing out coal. Host Italy is hoping for a pledge among the major countries about reaching net-zero emissions by the middle of the century. But many of the industrialized powers already have such targets in place; climate analysts say the bigger issue is that many countries have not yet taken concrete, immediate steps to put themselves on the right course.

ROME — President Biden and the other national leaders gathered for the G-20 summit have formally endorsed a new global minimum tax, capping months of negotiations over the groundbreaking tax accord.

The new global minimum tax of 15 percent aims to reverse the decades-long decline in tax rates on corporations across the world, a trend experts say has deprived governments of revenue to fund social spending programs. The deal is a key achievement for Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who made an international floor on corporate taxes among the top priorities of her tenure and pushed forcefully for swift action on a deal.

The plan was already endorsed by the finance ministers of each country, but its official approval by the heads of state puts added pressure on the difficult task of turning what remains an aspirational agreement into distinct legislation.

Once all the leaders had arrived at the summit site — well, at least those participating in person — it was time for a “family photo,” the first at a Group of 20 gathering in more than two years.

The leaders took their places along three levels of a tiered blue stage. Mario Draghi, as the prime minister of the host country, stood in the center. President Biden stood on the farthest end of one side. Just before the picture was taken, two missing figures — British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — darted onto the stage as others made room.

When those pleasantries were over, the leaders welcomed doctors and first responders onto the platform as well, applauding as they joined in.

Afterward, the leaders headed into a large, ovular hall, ringed by flags, where they will begin the formal part of Saturday’s summit.

A handful of Group of 20 heads were missing from the photo. Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia have not flown to Rome, citing the coronavirus, and are instead expected to participate remotely. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is staying home ahead of elections on Sunday. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is also not present, and has sent his foreign minister in his place.

President Biden arrived at the G-20 summit shortly after 11:30 a.m. local time, formally starting his involvement in the meeting with the world’s largest economies.

He was greeted by Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, just outside the headquarters of the summit.

Biden peeled off his mask, shook hands with Draghi and chatted warmly as the two men headed indoors.

The focus of Biden’s day will be a meeting with leaders of Germany, France and Britain — referred to as the E3 nations — to discuss Iran and efforts to resuscitate the 2015 deal meant to curb Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

Biden, along with the other world leaders, is also expected to formally endorse a new 15 percent global minimum tax, as his administration continues to work on a separate domestic agreement to pressure corporations to pay more in taxes to fund his sweeping social spending and climate package.

ROME — Security was high as leaders began arriving Saturday morning at the Group of 20 nations summit site, with much of the surrounding neighborhood cleared of cars and pedestrians and declared a “red zone.”

Restrictions on traffic began as far as several miles away from the neighborhood known as EUR, which includes the convention center hosting the leaders. Major roads leading in that direction were blocked by police; only those with accreditation could pass. Around the media center, which is one block from the convention center, many restaurants and other businesses were closed.

Early Saturday morning, according to the Italian news agency ANSA, police forcibly cleared a group of climate activists who had been sitting in the middle lanes of Via Cristoforo Colombo, a thoroughfare that leads to EUR. Armored vehicles and riot police also came to the scene, according to ANSA.

The group of protesters, known as Climate Camp, had been trying to call attention to the decisions of the world’s major powers, whose emissions reductions measures have been “wholly inadequate to the catastrophic scenarios that we can see in our present and future on this planet,” the group said.

“We’re here because the G-20 governments have failed.”

In the Roman neighborhood known as EUR, all the classic telltales of Rome drop away. Gone are the cobblestone roads, the antiquities, the worn palazzi dappled like watercolors. What you get instead are broad boulevards and imposing white buildings, plus a man-made lake. Everything is orderly, planned. Look in the right direction, and you’ll even see a sculpture heroically depicting the planner: Benito Mussolini.

Conceived as a fascist showpiece for an event that never happened — war canceled the 1942 World’s Fair — EUR is getting a chance eight decades later to serve as a backdrop for a global gathering: this time, the Group of 20 summit.

Reminders of what EUR (pronounced Ay-oor) was supposed to represent are still vivid. Mussolini had hoped it would stand as an example of an ideal city, with gardens and open spaces, and he commissioned some of the most acclaimed Italian architects and artists to remake a land used previously only by farmers and an abbey of cloistered monks. EUR’s boundaries were marked off in a near-perfect pentagon. Mussolini planted a tree at the 1938 groundbreaking.

But now, EUR also has lanyard-wearing office workers eating $12 salmon wraps. It has monuments designed to glorify the fascist ideal that now house global companies, like Fendi. It has a couple of eerie blocks almost resembling Pyongyang — empty, colossal and colonnaded — but it also has dentist’s office and chain restaurants, energy company headquarters and upper-middle-class apartments.

“What I’ve often heard is that a neighborhood like this could only be built by a dictator,” said Lorenzo Volpato, 49, a self-described leftist who lives and works in EUR and called the neighborhood pleasant regardless of the fascist markers. “It’s got metro stations. It’s modern. It’s more livable than Rome.”

The neighborhood has managed to grow — and normalize — in large part because of a Roman willingness to rebuild, move on and coexist with even the worst parts of the past. It’s especially striking at a time when monuments to enslavers, Confederate generals, kings and colonial leaders have come toppling down across the United States and other parts of Europe. In EUR, such monuments have become just a part of the low-slung skyline.

Mario Draghi’s life, as recently as nine months ago, was far more relaxing than it is now. He spent time at his Umbrian country house. He played golf with his son. His legacy, built as a central banker who had helped to rescue the euro zone from crisis, was already secured.

But with Italy in the depths of the pandemic, and searching for a prime minister, Draghi received an unsolicited invitation from the country’s president.

“And he couldn’t say no,” said Giovanni Orsina, director of the school of government at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome.

That explains how Draghi, 74 — pulled in from semiretirement to become prime minister — now finds himself again on the world stage, hosting a Group of 20 summit where the issues are as complicated as anything from his past. The two-day summit, dealing chiefly with climate change and the pandemic, will test how meaningfully the world’s industrial powers can ease gaping vaccine inequities and speed reductions in their greenhouse gas emissions. Especially on climate, where countries’ commitments are many times below what science suggests is necessary, there is a considerable risk of failure.

But while Draghi has limited sway on the outcome among the 19 other nations, he has already proved himself in another way, leaving his fingerprints on a country that is hosting the other leaders this weekend.

And what the visitors will find, in Draghi’s Italy, is a country that has become charmed — at least for now — by his political competence and clout. Italian pundits speak about Draghi glowingly, describing him as an above-the-fray prime minister with a degree of credibility that his predecessors lacked. So far, they say, he has been willing to make tough — sometimes unilateral — decisions regardless of their popularity. And he has proved popular nonetheless, with an approval rating of 63 percent, higher than those of most of his fellow democratic leaders who will be visiting Rome.

“Mario Draghi is sort of a Ferrari,” said Giampiero Massolo, president of the Italian Institute for International Political Studies, who also served as an Italian diplomat. “He is punching above the weight of Italy.”

President Biden basked in a warm glow from America’s allies on his first foreign trip as president in June, deploying the reassuring promise that “America is back.” But 4 ½ months later, as Biden begins his second round of international summits, U.S. allies are less certain that is the case.

The leaders of America’s closest partners have watched Biden’s popularity plummet while former president Donald Trump has begun holding raucous election-style rallies and making his trademark provocative or false pronouncements on a range of issues. And that is raising questions about the durability of any promises by — or agreements with — the current administration.

“After four years with Trump, the world is very, very curious whether this is a lasting new direction of American politics or we could risk a return to Trumpism in 2024,” said Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former Danish prime minister who served as NATO secretary general. “It will be an uphill effort for Biden to convince his allies and partners that he has changed American attitudes profoundly.”

Rasmussen said world leaders are watching Virginia’s gubernatorial election on Tuesday and would view a loss — or even a narrow win — by Democrat Terry McAuliffe as a warning sign. “It would add to some skepticism in Europe that the declaration that ‘America is back’ is only temporary,” Rasmussen said.

With Trump holding out the prospect of running for president again, and given a strong chance of claiming the GOP nomination if he does, foreign leaders are viewing Biden’s actions through the prism of American politics to a degree rare in recent years.

“After Biden, it may be Trump again,” said Gerard Araud, a former French ambassador to the United States. “So we Europeans, we have to learn to be grown up, we have to learn to defend or to handle our interests by ourselves.”