Scottish Event Campus
Glasgow, Scotland
3:07 P.M. GMT
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, our overriding purpose here in Glasgow is to raise the ambitions of our commitments to keep within reach our goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
But setting ambitious targets is only half of the equation, as you all know. We also have to concrete — have concrete plans for how we’re going to meet — how we’re going to meet those goals and decarbonize our economies to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.
To start, to state the obvious, we have to immediately scale up clean technologies that are already commercially available and cost-competitive, like wind and solar energy.
In the United States, we’ve set a goal of deploying 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030, creating tens of thousands of good-paying union jobs for American workers and meeting the power needs of almost 10,000 [10 million] American homes every year.
We can do this now. We don’t have to wait.
At the same time, we recognize that our current technology alone won’t get us where we need to be. So, it must also be a decisive decade for innovation: developing, demonstrating, and commercializing new clean energy technologies by 2030 so that we can — they can be widely deployed in time to meet our 2050 net-zero goals.
Clean hydrogen, long-duration energy storage, next-generation renewables and nuclear, carbon capture, sustainable agriculture, and so much more. We need to invest in breakthroughs, and I welcome the UK’s leadership on the Glasgow Breakthrough agenda.
Innovation is the key to unlocking our future. That’s why the United States is working to quadruple funding for clean energy research and development over the next four years.
And we will lead a year of action in 2022 to advance clean technologies globally.
Over the past two days, I’ve announced several U.S. government-led initiatives to help develop and scale clean energy transmission, but we can’t achieve our goals through government action alone.
I’m looking at some of the men and women in front of me that can help accelerate and develop clean energy technologies. The United States and the World Economic Forum are launching the First Movers Coalition.
So, let me explain what the First Movers Coalition is — and I expect that you already know.
The First Movers Coalition is starting with more than two dozen of the world’s largest and …….