NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO • April 22, 2021
President Biden will begin a global summit on climate change Thursday morning by announcing that the United States will aim to cut its greenhouse gas emissions in half, based on 2005 levels, by the end of the decade. That aggressive 2030 goal, which the White House is framing as a "50-52 percent reduction," will be formalized in a document called a "nationally determined contribution," or NDC. The NDC is a public commitment to address climate change made by each country that signed on to the 2015 Paris Agreement, which the U.S. formally left last year at the behest of then-President Donald Trump and reentered this year after Biden took office.