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New Report Warns Earth in Uncharted Territory with Climate; Now, Supreme Court Hears Oral Arguments on Texas Abortion Ban; Global Death Toll from COVID-19 Surpasses 5 Million People. Aired 10-10:30a ET

Aired November 01, 2021 - 10:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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[10:00:00]

ERICA HILL, CNN NEWSROOM: A good Monday morning. I'm Erica Hill.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN NEWSROOM: I'm Jim Sciutto back in Washington.

President Biden set to speak in Glasgow, Scotland, this hour as we looks to re-establish the U.S. as one of the leaders in the global fight against climate change. Right now, hundreds of world leaders are gathered for what's known as the COP26 U.N. Climate Summit. Over the next two weeks, they will hammer out ways to address climate change across the globe, and, Erica, we'll see if those are concrete commitments.

HILL: Yes, exactly. New this morning, the World Meteorological Organization says climate change has propelled the Earth into, quote, uncharted territory. The U.N. secretary general driving home the urgency of this crisis just moments ago. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANTONIO GUTERRES, U.N. SECRETARY GENERAL: Enough of killing ourselves with carbon. Enough of treating nature like a toilet. Enough of burning and drilling and mining our way deeper. We are digging our own graves.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HILL: CNN has reporters and correspondents on the ground in Scotland as the climate meetings kick off this morning. Wolf Blitzer and Kaitlan Collins joining us, CNN Chief Climate Correspondent Bill Weir is in Glasgow.

So, Wolf, I want to start with you. As we look at this moment, yes, this is a big moment for the planet, as we know, this is a very big moment for President Biden. Can you put that into context for us why it's so important today?

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: It's a huge moment because this whole issue of the climate is so, so critical. It's a lifesaving development over these next several years that needs to be addressed. He has it very, very high on his priority list right now.

He had hoped to come to Scotland, Erica, with a deal in the House and the Senate with billions of dollars devoted specifically to this issue of the climate. Unfortunately for him, he didn't succeed in that, but he's hoping in the next several days to get that done.

He would have been in a little bit stronger position if he'd come with all of that in handle, but he's gearing up together with his top aides for all sorts of initiatives to deal with this critically important issue, not only legislative issues, legislation, but also executive orders, executive decisions that he could take on his own.

So, this is a real high priority because the stakes are clearly so enormous.

SCIUTTO: Bill, good to have you here given that you cover the climate so closely here. Can you tell us what the $550 billion in the budget proposal actually does? And is it realistic, as the administration says, that those measures could cut U.S. emissions by half by 2030? I mean, that's quite an ambitious goal. And I wonder from your reality check stand point, that holds up.

BILL WEIR, CNN CHIEF CLIMATE CORRESPONDENT: It's really a stretch, Jim, to be honest. This is a plan with an awful lot of carrots and not enough sticks. A lot of incentives, tax incentives for folks to maybe buy an electric car, but there's no punishment for utility companies that don't switch off of coal or natural gas on to something cleaner fast enough. So you may be charging your electric car with coal, which defeats the purpose.

And just to put it into perspective, that's $550 billion over ten years. So $55 billion a year is less than half of what the storms so far will cost the United States. We've had -- it's not even -- you know, we just started November, a couple months ago. The storm tally so far is well over $100 billion. So, the cost of inaction, people are saying, would be stratospherically higher than anything we could do, you know, in the near term to sort of shore up for this and prevent the worst case scenarios for our kids.

HILL: It's interesting as we look at that, right? Bill, as you go through, what's really in there, what the real impact could be.

That being said into Wolf's point, Kaitlan, this is really a signature issue for President Biden, and he's brought in plenty of big guns with him to really try to show that commitment from the United States. It's a show of force, and it was the White House saying how much muscle, how much meat is really behind that, Kaitlan?

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN CHIEF WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, and you have to look at what they are coming in and what they are confronting. It's not just climate change, but it's also coming on the heels of a president who withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accords and who questioned climate change at times in his political career.

[10:05:04] And so, of course, that is what they're dealing with is the consistency of an American presidency and just how committed they are to climate change.

And so President Biden is trying to give this message that, yes, the U.S. is serious about confronting it. That is really going to be the overarching part of his speech today and laying out his personal commitment to doing so, aides say, and what exactly steps they're going to take with two goals in mind, the year 2030 and the year 2050.

And his climate envoy, John Kerry, who is here with him as part of that show of force, alongside his other climate adviser, Gina McCarthy, said that the president really has two goals. And one of those is to convince other nations to agree to a global attempt to contain a rise in temperatures, and then the other one is also to get them to take concrete steps in the next decade, not just looking at that 2050 goal that so many nations have set, but also what are they doing, what concrete steps are they taking by 2030.

But what you're hearing from officials is they're also saying this is not the end of the road. We're not viewing this summit as we're going to walk in and be able to lay everything out and get on all on the same page. And they say that a lot of that has to do with who is not going to be at the summit. Of course, China and Russia, two of the world's biggest emitters, are not going to be here. And so it's a little bit more difficult to have a conversation about that and to get realistic agreement on that when some are not at the table on this.

And the president himself acknowledged yesterday he's disappointed that Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Putin are not going to be here at this summit. So, that is another factor that they'll be dealing with as some skeptics have questioned whether the delivery and the remarks, or the rhetoric that these -- you're hearing from these world leaders, actually matches what they're delivering.

SCIUTTO: Wolf, notable absences, as Kaitlan notes there, China and Russia, as with the G20 in Rome, and it's even different in Edinburgh because Putin, for instance, is going to send a recorded statement. They're not letting him Zoom in for this, right, to participate from afar.

So, I wonder what are the ambitions there for an agreement, a commitment from the some 200 nations that are there? And can that commitment hold if you don't have one of the world's biggest emitters and one of the world's biggest oil exporters in Russia present?

BLITZER: And the Saudi Arabia as well, the leadership of Saudi Arabia has decided not to attend either. And I think either crowned prince or the king, they're not here as well. So, all of that is so significant. They would have loved Putin to be here, President Xi of China to be here, the Saudi leadership, other countries represented. But, sadly, they decided to not attend. They have got all sorts of reasons, the COVID pandemic among others, that would preclude travel, if you will.

But this is really an important moment for the world because you're absolutely right. If these other countries are not involved directly in reducing the emissions, if they're not involved in trying to raise the money that is needed to help the poor nations of the world deal with this over the next decade, two decades or so, it's going to be a real, real serious problem.

And Kaitlan is absolutely right. President Biden is bringing along his top leadership, almost all of them have decided to come, including the former president, Barack Obama, is going to be here, the former vice president, Al Gore, is already here. The U.S. in contrast to the Trump administration is playing an extremely high, very public role in underscoring how critically important this issue is right now.

As you know, the Trump administration withdrew from the Paris Climate Accords, and when they had these kinds of COP summits earlier during the Trump administration, the U.S. had relatively a low-level profile. They didn't even talk much about the critical importance of dealing with climate change. And that has changed dramatically right now.

Let's see if the House and the Senate get their act together and pass the legislation on climate that the really president wants, because that will be significant as well.

HILL: Bill, as we look at all of this, it just comes back to yet again an incredibly important issue that is facing not just the United States but the world that has been politicized over a number of years. This is not new.

Coming into this, is there a sense that things are starting to change? Is there a sense that warnings, like we just heard from the U.N. secretary-general, that we're digging our own graves, is that starting to sink in more across the globe?

WEIR: You would think so, Erica, to be sure. I think that there's an awful lot of Greta Thunbergs sitting at an awful lot kitchen tables, not just in the United States but around the world pressing their folks, their grand folks for answers on how this mess was made, absolutely. I mean, urgency is compounded by every drought, every wildfire season that we're seeing, every big storm, as well. But so much of this is human nature and how we're not equipped for this.

And you don't get elected to public office or to a board of directors by saying, you know what, guys, we've got to slow down on our consumption, we need to ease off cutting down the next forest in order to build another subdivision.

[10:10:09]

That's just not how the financial structures of the developed world are set up. But there's still so much hope. Humans are the greatest problem solvers on the planet as well. And the same frontal lobes that made this mess can fix it with the right political will.

But so much of this particular conference, again, the 26th Conference of Parties, so we've been talking about this for over 25 years, this one is about trust. And Wolf touched on a big one, which is trust from developing countries who didn't make this mess who are suffering the brunt of the pain saying, you guys, you got to pay your tab. And years ago, the rich countries said, we'll give $100 billion a year to the poorer countries to help them adapt to clean energy, skip the mistakes of the industrial revolution. And none of that has really gone out the door yet.

Boris Johnson, he upped the U.K.'s commitment today by over a billion dollars. It looks like maybe 2023 they can start to see that. But in India, for example, which burns more coal than U.S. and Europe combined, they're saying, until we start seeing that money, we can't afford to get off of coal. So, everything is connected politically.

SCIUTTO: Wolf, when we were in Rome, we heard a lot of managing of expectations about G20 accomplishments. They did get a global agreement on a minimum and corporate tax. They made some climate commitments. But I wonder from there, what do leaders, officials say was the biggest deliverable, the biggest takeaway from the G20 summit that they feel was an accomplishment?

BLITZER: Well, just getting together, I guess, they think was an accomplishment. But you're right. There was disappointment that they really didn't achieve a whole lot more. There were a lot of words that were spoken, a lot of words that were pushed forward. But as far as practical deeds, yes, this corporate minimum tax, that's a very significant development.

But I didn't see a whole lot of other major, major initiatives that were moved forward. You know, it was important, though, for -- I think for President Biden to be there. He had a chance to patch up relations with France, with President Macron, given the nature of what had happened in the weeks earlier, that submarine deal that the U.S. put forward with Australia. I think that was important.

I think it was important for the president personally, very important for him to meet with Pope Francis and have that meeting in here. That Pope Francis believes he is a good Catholic, he can continue to receive his communion despite his position on abortion rights for women. That was really, really personally so important for the president. So, he did achieve that, and I think he left Rome and came to Scotland encouraged by those developments. But there're still so many other problems out there.

And hovering over all of this, let's not forget, is COVID-19, this pandemic. According to the Johns Hopkins University, more than 5 billion have already died from COVID and, sadly, a lot more are going to be dying. Even though in the developing countries, maybe 50, 60, 70 percent of people are vaccinated, in the less developed, in the poorer countries, it may be 2 or 3 or 4 percent. And as long as it is spreading through, there will be mutations and potentially greater dangers for everyone around the world. So, that hovers over all of these summits.

SCIUTTO: No question. The pandemic knows no borders, as we often say. Wolf Blitzer, Kaitlan Collins, Bill Weir, so good to have you all on and we look forward to having you back on as we hear more from events in Scotland.

And right now, the Supreme Court is hearing arguments on something of enormous consequence nationally, the Texas abortion ban, this as protesters gathering outside. What this could mean for the future of Roe v. Wade, big questions here.

And by the end of the week, younger children could start getting vaccinated for COVID-19. By the end of this week, will most parents take advantage of that new recommendation?

HILL: Plus, what can the two candidates in the Virginia governor's race say today that could sway any undecided voters ahead of tomorrow's election? We're live on the campaign trip.

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HILL: Happening right now, a monumental case playing out inside the Supreme Court, the court holding oral arguments this morning as they consider a Texas law that bans abortions at around six weeks of pregnancy. Remember, no exception for rape or incest.

SCIUTTO: It's the most restrictive in the country. Abortion activists wonder what it means for other states, the future of Roe v. Wade, not just abortion advocates. People watching saying this is a consequential decision for women across the country.

CNN Justice Correspondent Jessica Schneider is outside the Supreme Court this morning. So, Jessica, walk us through what exactly the court is considering today.

JESSICA SCHNEIDER, CNN JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Well, Jim and Erica, the court right now, beginning at 10:00 this morning, hearing arguments in two separate but related cases. The challenges are coming from the Justice Department and abortion providers in Texas, both arguing that this Texas abortion law, SB-8, is unconstitutional and they're saying that it was specifically designed to evade federal court review, which up to this point it has. Remember, the justices here declined to block this law on September 1st. The law has now been in effect in Texas for two months effectively shutting down abortion clinics across the state.

[10:20:00]

In the first few minutes of arguments we heard first, as we typically have this term, from conservative Justice Clarence Thomas. He's celebrating 30 years on the bench today. Notably, Clarence Thomas has been outspoken about the need to revisit Roe v. Wade, saying that it has spiraled out of control. This abortion law has sparked nationwide outrage. Here at the Supreme Court, we're seeing protesters on both sides.

In Texas, we've seen plenty of protests springing up about this bill that has forced many women in that state to travel hundreds of miles across state lines to get abortions, abortion clinics in neighboring states like Oklahoma, New Mexico, saying they are seeing their abortion clinics take on many more patients than they have in the past. This law it prohibits abortion providers from performing abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected. That's typically at six weeks before many women even know they're pregnant. But, crucially, the difference in this law is that it allows private citizens to sue, to essentially enforce this law as opposed to state officials. And that's the crux of the argument here, whether the state of Texas can purposely evade federal court review by allowing -- by putting the enforcement power in private citizens' hands. So, that's really at the center of the argument here.

Notably, the Supreme Court fast-tracked this case, hearing these arguments in record time here. This really points to the fact that these justices understand the gravity of this law and how it's affecting women in Texas and really throughout the country, especially in those neighboring states.

The Justice Department here, as well as Whole Women's Health and the abortion providers challenging this case, they are looking for the Supreme Court to give them the green light to say, yes, go ahead, you can challenge this law, you can challenge it on the merits, and then that's when they would go back down to the lower courts.

But it's all up to the Supreme Court. We're expecting, guys, that they will likely come down with a decision in this case before we usually see decisions later in the spring. They could decide maybe in a matter of weeks as to whether these lawsuits can move forward and whether this law can continue to be challenged with maybe the effect of eventually blocking it. Erica and Jim?

HILL: Yes, so much to watch, so much that could come out of this. Jessica Schneider, I appreciate it. Thank you.

SCIUTTO: No question. Meanwhile, that law stands in the state of Texas.

Well, the White House press secretary as tested positive for COVID-19. Health officials say there is little chance, however, she infected the president. We're going to explain why they believe so just after the break.

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[10:25:00]

SCIUTTO: A grim milestone today. The world has now surpassed 5 million total deaths from COVID-19. Vaccination efforts continue around the globe. And here in the U.S., the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, has just revealed that has tested positive for COVID-19. Though she is fully vaccinated, there are breakthrough cases. She is not traveling with President Biden on his European trip. The White House announced today that the president took a test required to enter the U.K. and he, Biden, was negative.

HILL: Joining us now, CNN Senior Medical Correspondent Elizabeth Cohen. Elizabeth, obviously a lot of interest in this story given how close Jen Psaki is to the president every day. So, walk us through what we know.

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: So, Erica, the question, of course, on everyone's mind is, is it possible that Jen Psaki could have infected President Biden. And when we spoke to experts, they said it would be virtually impossible, virtually impossible for her to have infected President Biden. First of all, keep in mind, that yesterday he took a COVID it is as part of his travel into the United Kingdom and it was negative. So, there's the first of all.

Here's the second of all. Let's take a look at this timeline and you'll see what I mean. On Tuesday of last week, that was the last time that Psaki and Biden were together. They were outside. They were six feet apart. They were wearing masks. The next day, Jen Psaki started her quarantine because she said members of her family tested positive. And then she tested negative that day and the next day, all the way until October 30th. It wasn't until yesterday that she tested positive. So, the chance that she could have, you know, been positive and transmitted it to him sitting so far apart, outside with masks, days before she tested positive, virtually impossible.

And we should note, as you said, that Jen Psaki had a breakthrough case. Jen Psaki is fully vaccinated, but this does happen, and she credits the vaccine for the fact that she only has mild symptoms. This is a win for the vaccine. She's infected but only mildly ill. Erica, Jim? SCIUTTO: And that's what the data shows really remarkably well across

the board. Elizabeth Cohen, thanks so much.

Tomorrow, we should note, the CDC will consider emergency use authorization of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine for kids aged 5 to 11. This is a big moment. If the agency and director sign off, those shots could be available to children as soon as this Wednesday.

HILL: Right now, the Pfizer vaccine, of course, is the only one available to those under 18, so it's currently authorized for 12 to 17-year-olds. Moderna now says that the FDA, on late Friday, said it actually wants a little bit more time to review its vaccine for 12- to 17-year-olds, specifically citing concerns about --