Led by Pelosi, Democrats try to convince the world that the U.S. is back on climate change

Fresh off a successful vote on a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill late Friday, Pelosi led a delegation of nearly two dozen House members on Tuesday to the U.N. climate conference, known as COP26. The speaker said it was the largest group of Congress members to ever attend a climate summit.

Pelosi stressed that while the infrastructure bill is a first step toward addressing global warming, House Democrats plan to pass another roughly $2 trillion spending package — which contains a historic $555 billion investment in climate — the week of Nov. 15.

“Led by our delegation, the United States Congress is showing the world true climate leadership,” she said. “We’re proud of our president. He was one of the first people in Congress, in 1986, to introduce legislation to address the climate crisis. He takes great pride in that he’s worked on it ever since.”

The roughly $2 trillion tax-and-spending bill — called the “Build Back Better Act,” which bears the name of Biden’s 2020 campaign slogan — represents the largest clean-energy investment in U.S. history. It includes a $555 billion package of tax credits, grants and other policies aimed at reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the Earth.

Pelosi spoke at a press conference inside the Scottish Event Campus, a cavernous conference venue next to the River Clyde, alongside five committee chairs. Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), a Pelosi ally who chairs the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, sought to downplay the drama surrounding the Build Back Better plan in the Senate, where centrist Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) has objected to a number of its climate provisions.

“You all may have been following a little bit of the drama out of Washington, D.C.,” Castor said. “But it was just a few days ago that the House passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and took the first step towards passage of the Build Back Better Act. This is historic.”

Castor added that the spending bill would help the nation meet Biden’s goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 50 to 52 percent by 2030 — in addition to helping the world meet the Paris agreement’s more ambitious target of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.

Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), who chairs the Committee on Energy and Commerce, said the Build Back Better plan would also allow the U.S. to fulfill its commitment under the Global Methane Pledge, which aims to reduce methane emissions by 30 percent by 2030. He declined to mention that Manchin has raised concern about the bill’s fee on emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that warms the planet faster than carbon dioxide in the short term.

Earlier on Tuesday, five other House Democrats spoke on a separate panel at the U.N. climate conference, including progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who was the subject of online vitriol on Monday night after Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.) shared an altered, animated video that showed him killing Ocasio-Cortez and swinging two swords at President Biden.

Ocasio-Cortez responded when her plane landed in Glasgow, saying Gosar will probably “face no consequences” because House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) “cheers him on with excuses.” A Gosar staffer defended the video Monday night, dismissing claims that it glorifies violence and saying “everyone needs to relax.”

On the panel, Ocasio-Cortez said that grassroots climate activists have had a major influence in shaping Biden’s climate agenda. During the presidential campaign, Biden “invited grassroots organizations to the table to inform his climate task force, to inform his presidential policy. We have seen the successful translation of that grassroots frame into federal policy,” she said.

Ocasio-Cortez did not mention the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led climate organization, by name. But she appeared to be referring to the fact that Varshini Prakash, the executive director of the group, served on an environmental task force that Biden formed with onetime rival Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) last year. The task force played a key role in making Biden’s climate proposals more ambitious during the campaign.

“Just two or three years ago, no one wanted to touch climate and environmental justice with a 100 foot pole,” Prakash said in an email. “Politicians aren’t ignoring us anymore and it’s because we agitated, we organized and we bird dogged these politicians every place they were.”

“Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi must know this: if Democrats don’t deliver on the climate promises they ran and won on during the 2020 campaign cycle, they will fail our generation and risk the votes of young people in 2022 and beyond," she said.

Former president Barack Obama also schlepped to the climate summit on Monday deliver a similar message about the power of youth climate activists — after around 100,0000 students and others marched through the streets of Glasgow on Saturday to protest world leaders’ perceived inaction inside the conference. Obama told young people to “stay angry” in the fight against global warming while voting more climate-conscious candidates into office.

Pelosi’s delegation to COP26 struck a sharp contrast with her delegation to the previous round of U.N. climate talks in Madrid in 2019. At that time, Pelosi had to convince other nations that the U.S. was serious about cutting emissions despite the leadership of Trump, who called climate change a “hoax” and rolled back a host of environmental regulations.

In addition to Pelosi’s Democratic delegation, a smaller group of six Republicans also attended the summit this year. Some of the GOP lawmakers came to Glasgow to take a shot at Democrats for what they perceived as an “alarmist” climate agenda.

Democrats "engage in this sort of alarmist narrative, which is inherently anti-science,” Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Tex.) said. “It’s also anti-common sense, and anti-engineering. So if your actual goal is to reduce carbon emissions, generally speaking, the way somebody like Obama — the way our American left — wants to engage in that is deeply foolish.”

And some youth activists have been frustrated to watch Democrats struggle to pass climate legislation, as they work to appease Manchin and overcome intra-party divisions.

Vanessa Nakate, a 24-year-old climate activist from Uganda, said that while she was pleased to see Biden commit to increasing the U.S. contribution to a $100 billion annual fund that helps poor countries adapt to climate change, she’s not holding her breath for Congress to appropriate the money.

“I was 13 years old when President Obama talked about the $100 billion climate finance. But it has not yet been delivered,” Nakate said. “So it is hard for me to believe that the money that has been committed will be delivered, and yet the previous promise is just a broken promise.”

Hannah Jewell, Casey Silvestri and Dan Zak contributed to this report from Glasgow.