These are the 40 world leaders that the US invited to today’s summit

President Biden kicked off the Leaders Summit on Climate Thursday with welcoming remarks, calling on the world leaders to take action to combat climate change collectively as he announced an aggressive new goal for greenhouse gas emissions.

The first moments of Biden’s remarks, including the entirety of introductory remarks by Vice President Kamala Harris, were wracked with audio issues. The pool was unable to provide the summit live to television networks, a last-minute change, so reporters were reliant on a whitehouse.gov feed.

Biden pointed to actions the US would take, an effort to reassert US leadership and put the US back to the center of the global effort to address the climate crisis after the Trump administration largely disengaged.

Biden focused on the job creation aspect of addressing the climate crisis in his remarks, suggesting he sees “an opportunity to create millions of good-paying middle class union jobs.”

“When I talk about climate, I think jobs. Within our climate response lies an extraordinary job creation and economic opportunity ready to be fired up,” Biden said, going on to urge investment in infrastructure.

“I want to build critical infrastructure to produce and deploy clean technology, both those we can harness today and those we will invent tomorrow,” he said.

Harris made brief introductory remarks ahead of Biden, outlining how the leaders present share the common concern of climate change.

“As a global community, it is imperative that we act quickly and together,” she said, calling for innovation and collaboration “around the world.”