WATCH LIVE: Day 2 of Biden's Virtual Summit on Climate Change

(Apr. 23) Watch live as President Joe Biden hosts Day 2 of his virtual summit on climate change with 40 world leaders on Friday, April 23, 2021.

The White House brought out the billionaires, the CEOs and the union executives Friday to help sell President Joe Biden’s climate-friendly transformation of the U.S. economy at his virtual summit of world leaders.

The closing day of the two-day summit on climate change showcased Bill Gates and Mike Bloomberg, steelworker and electrical union leaders and executives for solar and other renewable energy.

“We can’t beat climate change without a historic amount of new investment,” said Bloomberg, who’s donated millions to promote replacing dirty-burning coal-fired power plants with increasingly cheaper renewable energy.

“We have to do more, faster to cut emissions,” Bloomberg said in his push for big investment.

Biden envoy John Kerry stressed the political selling point that the president’s call for retrofitting creaky U.S. infrastructure to run more cleanly would put the U.S. on a better economic footing long-term.

“No one is being asked for a sacrifice,” Kerry said. “This is an opportunity.”

It’s all in service of an argument U.S. officials say will make or break Biden’s climate agenda: Pouring trillions of dollars into clean-energy technology, research and infrastructure will speed a competitive U.S. economy into the future and create jobs, while saving the planet.

“Climate change is more than a threat,” Biden declared on Thursday’s opening day of his climate summit. “It also presents one of the largest job creation opportunities in history.”

The new urgency comes as scientists say that climate change caused by coal plants, car engines and other fossil fuel use is worsening droughts, floods, hurricanes, wildfires and other disasters and that humans are running out of time to stave off catastrophic extremes of global warming.

The event has featured the world’s major powers — and major polluters — pledging to cooperate on cutting petroleum and coal emissions that are rapidly warming the planet.

But Republicans are sticking to the arguments that former President Donald Trump made in pulling the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris climate accord. They point to China as the world’s worst climate polluter — the U.S. is No. 2 — and say any transition to clean energy hurts American oil, natural gas and coal workers.

It means “putting good-paying American jobs into the shredder,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said on the Senate floor Thursday in a speech in which he dismissed the administration’s plans as costly and ineffective.

“This is quite the one-two punch,” McConnell said. “Toothless requests of our foreign adversaries ... and maximum pain for American citizens.”

In an announcement timed to his summit, Biden pledged the U.S. will cut fossil fuel emissions as much as 52% by 2030.

Allies joined the U.S. in announcing new moves to cut emissions, striving to build momentum going into November’s U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, where governments will say how far each is willing to go to cut the amount of fossil fuel fumes it pumps out.

Japan announced its own new 46% emissions reduction target, and South Korea said it would stop public financing of new coal-fired power plants, potentially an important step toward persuading China and other coal-reliant nations to curb the building and funding of new ones as well. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said his nation would boost its fossil fuel pollution cuts from 30% to at least 40%.

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