John Kerry Thinks We're at a Critical Moment on Climate Change - The New Yorker

John Kerry Thinks We’re at a Critical Moment on Climate Change | The New Yorker

We’re used to thinking of Joe Biden—first elected to the Senate in 1972—as the personification of a career public servant. But John Kerry can match him. Kerry, who was awarded three Purple Hearts, among other honors, for his service as a Swift-boat commander, first testified to the Senate in 1971, in his role as a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam?” he memorably asked the assembled members of the Foreign Relations Committee. “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

It took him a dozen more years to be elected to the Senate from Massachusetts, but he eventually became the chair of that same Foreign Relations Committee, and then the Democratic Presidential nominee, in 2004, and then Hillary Clinton’s successor as Barack Obama’s Secretary of State. Among other accomplishments in that role, he signed the landmark Paris climate accord for the United States, in 2016, which stipulated a global effort aimed at limiting temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. When Biden became President in 2021, he named Kerry the first Presidential climate envoy, and charged him with helping to coördinate global action on the climate crisis, which has included negotiating arrangements with countries such as Vietnam to speed their transition from coal, working to secure pledges from much of the world to work on plugging methane leaks, and coördinating research on reducing emissions from agriculture.

He’s been perhaps most closely involved in negotiations with the Chinese government, in particular with his longtime interlocutor Xie Zhenhua, who retired in December at the age of seventy-four. One of Xie’s last encounters with Kerry came last December at the COP28 climate talks in Dubai, where Xie’s eight-year-old grandson presented Kerry with a card for his eightieth birthday. Now Kerry, too, is leaving his post—eager, he says, to escape the constraints of the Hatch Act, which prevents federal employees from political engagement.

“I am stepping down to put focus on implementing what we accomplished in Dubai, which will require J.B. getting re-elected but also the deployment of massive clean energy and vast sums of investment to win this fight. I intend to work globally to push the private sector,” he wrote me, as we were setting up the exit interview that follows, which was conducted a couple of weeks before he left his office, and which has been edited and condensed. We began, of course, by talking about the weather. I noted that Vermont, where I live, was coming through the warmest winter in its recorded history.

KERRY: I was just talking to some folks about that. Now the ponds don’t freeze. There’s no black ice. There’s very little snow. We’ve got seven hundred days in Boston without more than [four] inches of the stuff.

That leads obviously into the first important question. You’ve been doing this a very long time. You were there when the Paris accords were signed, and every year since, except for the depths of COVID, the world has produced more greenhouse gases, the temperature keeps going up. Is there reason to think that that momentum is about to break? Or has this been a kind of exercise in futility?

I don’t think it’s an exercise in futility. But neither is it an exercise of victory or near-victory at the moment, though we have made progress. When I took over the job, on January 20th of 2021, we were headed to [a global temperature increase of] four degrees [Celsius]. Nothing very much was happening. The United States—we’d pulled out, under Donald Trump, from the Paris agreement. We had no money in the budget. And I didn’t have an office. We met at a hotel on January 20th of 2021.

I had a core group of people around me, and we decided to keep 1.5 alive. And we sat there and said, you know, that has to be the guiding north star. Why? Because, in 2018, the best scientists in the world [at the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] who have been following this so closely told us, “You guys have twelve years within which to implement the key issues, and, by the way, 1.5 is not a throwaway, aspirational thing from Paris. 1.5 is real. You got to try to achieve that.”

So I think we’ve made frankly remarkable progress, beginning with the summit that President Biden hosted [in 2021]. President Xi was there, President Putin was there, and Prime Minister Modi. Twenty major emitting [parties] of the world, who are equal to about eighty per cent of all emissions, and they all agreed to raise their ambition. And, lo and behold, in Glasgow [where the COP26 global climate talks were held, in 2021], they did raise ambition, for the most part.

And we put on the table—in furtherance of the President’s instructions to restore America’s credibility—we created the methane pledge. We created the shipping challenge, which brought the major shippers of the world to the table, to begin to decarbonize the ships, and indeed now, as of a week or two ago, the major shipping companies are building massive numbers of new ships, and they calculate they will have a turnover in the fleet, being decarbonized within the next twenty years. And I look at the agriculture initiatives that we put together, with the U.A.E. and the E.U., which have focussed on regenerative agriculture and on fertilizers. I think that awareness is significantly enhanced. There was a big food-production component to COP28. We created a loss-of-damage fund. It’s going to have to raise money, obviously, but it’s there and it wasn’t before.

So, at some point in the next few years, these lines that have been going up as long as you and I are both alive should start going down as a result of all of this?

I think that that is wishful thinking unless we implement what we said we would implement. Here’s the bottom line: in Dubai, a hundred and ninety-five countries—in the most difficult diplomacy of all, where one country can say no and you’re screwed—we got people to sign off on an operative paragraph that goes way beyond Paris. [It says,] to wit, that we must transition “away from fossil fuels . . . in a just, orderly, equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade”—a phrase that isn’t paid much attention to but I think is key—“accelerating action in this critical decade so as to achieve net zero by 2050,” which means you’ve got to have a plan. And, finally, “in keeping with the science,” and according to the science means 1.5 degrees. It’s up to us. We have created a framework which could allow us to win. But, at the pace we are moving today, we’re not going to. We’re not on track. We’re heading into two and a half degrees of warming. The oil and gas companies are making record profits, and not enough of that goes back into this effort.

So we’re at a really critical moment. And the reason that I’ve decided to step away from this position is not because the job is done. It’s because I believe if we don’t deploy the funding and finance, it doesn’t happen. We have to bring all kinds of technologies to scale. We have to do it rapidly. We have to fund the Global South for development purposes and fairness and moral reasons and so forth. And I feel I can put more effort into that.

Since you were talking about that paragraph from Dubai, I guess the question is whether or not people meant it. Do you think that it was behind the Biden Administration’s decision to pause liquified-natural-gas permits[for new terminals to export L.N.G.]? And do you think that was taken as a sign that the Biden Administration is actually serious about this?

I think it’s great that President Biden did it. Many of us were obviously wanting him to and pushing in that direction. So it’s a courageous decision, and it’s got to be a message to people.

The question is: Can we move fast enough to rein in the rise in emissions that has to come to an end? Can we stop permitting unabated, coal-fired power plants that are still being brought online? Even there, there’s reason to have a little bit of hope, in the sense that China has become the world’s largest single producer of renewables in the world, and they are deploying more solar and wind than all of the rest of the world put together.

When you talk to your Chinese colleagues, and you’ve talked more with China about energy than anyone in the world, how do you understand the role of the coal lobby within China, in their internal political debates? Does it play the same role that Exxon plays in U.S. politics?

No, it’s a little bit different, because they’re not engaging in it as an export exercise where they make a lot of money. They want the power. They’re scared of brownouts and blackouts, and the sine qua non of the Chinese government is staying in power—is keeping people happy. So, essentially, their coal program is a jobs program. But I believe China is teeing up to be in a position to surprise the world with the amount that they’re actually going to be doing, to be able to achieve their goals.

But potentially, they could be bringing three hundred and sixty gigawatts of coal-fired power online. Yet they say they don’t think that’s going to happen.

China is interesting to talk about when you’re talking about the U.S., because they’re a net importer of fossil fuel and, at this point, a huge net exporter of green energy. Meanwhile, the U.S. is the biggest single producer of hydrocarbons on the planet, and a huge exporter—something that’s completely new. It was the same week in 2015 that you negotiated the Paris climate accord that Congress put us back in the business of exporting oil and gas, and already we’re No. 1. How has that undercut America’s legitimacy in this work around the world?

I think for the moment it doesn’t cut it for some, but obviously there’s some people that just won’t trust and won’t believe in what the strategy is.

But you have to not only affect the supply side to win this battle, you have to affect the demand side. The fact is, we’ve been doing that slowly, not fast enough, but E.V.s affect the demand side. And, according to the I.E.A. [International Energy Agency], because of the impact of E.V.s, and the deployment of renewables by many people, they have detected a terminal downturn in the fossil-fuel demand curve.

If that’s true, that’s hope for everybody. And the theory behind what President Biden is doing. And, again, I’d like to see us doing less permitting [for new fossil-fuel infrastructure and drilling]. We have all the permits we need. And we need to be sending the right signals.

And I think the President understands that, but there was a feeling among some that you’ve got to manage this economically, so you don’t wind up with the shortages that drive prices up, and then everybody goes nuts, and you wind up with the wrong person being President. So there has to be some economic reality to how we transition. We have six years to meet the goal of a forty-three-per-cent reduction, which was recommended by the scientists in the 2018 [I.P.C.C.] report. My belief is we can get there, and then we bring other things online. The green hydrogen begins to come online, and we get better battery storage; we get better direct air carbon capture.

Sometime in your tenure, we crossed some invisible line where the price of power from sun and wind dropped below the price of power from fossil fuel. How did that begin to change the way that the rest of the world looked at this question, and why hasn’t it changed it more? Why are Asian countries going on building what, at this point, are expensive fossil-fuel plants?

I think it can be attributed to a number of things. One, business as usual is easier for some of these guys. No. 2, just plain old greed. And, No. 3, the profit doesn’t compare.

You had the experience of being a practical politician in Congress, for decades, in the middle of your career. What can you tell us about the role that fossil fuel plays in our political life?

It’s closely tied to the role that money plays. I think I ran the first race for the Senate that was completely PAC free. I didn’t take any money for political-action committees. It’s a lot harder, because you have to travel more and raise more money just from individual people. And it hasn’t happened very much.

Reform of that system has not been a topic for the last ten years. It’s bizarre. When I was in the Senate, John McCain and I and Russ Feingold, we were sort of the vanguard of trying to get campaign-finance reform and get the money out of the system, because the money pollutes the system in ways that are just horrendous. And you can look at some of these folks who will say, “Well, we’re ready to go green.” But you look at their [trade] association money, and how it’s spent up on the Hill. And it’s supporting advertisements that are completely contrary to the stated policy. So it’s not pretty.

As long as we’re on the subject of politics: sometimes you hear people say, “This energy transition is baked in enough now that it wouldn’t matter if Donald Trump got elected.” How do you see the impact of four years of a Trump Presidency beginning in 2025?

Who is President matters hugely to this fight, to be able to get to net zero, and also to be able to reach the 2030 goal. (And, by the way, if you don’t reach the 2030 goal, there is no net zero by 2050. People need to understand: you can’t sit there and wait and say we’ll do it later; it has to happen now.) Obviously, a President could come in and put a bad person at the E.P.A. and the Interior and, in terms of every issue which requires a sign-off or something from the federal government, it would be stopped in short; it would slow things down.

Now, will it stop everything? The answer is no. And we saw that during the Trump Administration, because we have renewable-portfolio laws in thirty-seven of our states [specifying how much power must be provided by clean-energy sources]—and those thirty-seven governors, Republican and Democrat, alike, continuing to live by those laws, even while Trump was President. I think the marketplace has basically decided this is the direction we’re going, and this is the future. Look at Ford and General Motors as an example of that. Both of them—Mary Barra and Bill Ford [the chairs of those companies]—decided they’re going to sell electric vehicles, and they’re targeting a time when that’s all they sell.

And so, if someone else were to become President, those folks are not going to go back and say, Oh, look, there’s a new President. Let’s build internal-combustion-engine cars again. Absolutely not happening.

Most of the planet’s money is in the North, often in the form of pension funds. And most of the need is in the Global South. How do we make that into an opportunity, instead of a problem?

By getting America to be America again, the way we used to be. We’re the largest humanitarian donor in the world, and every American should be very proud of that. For years, beginning with the Marshall Plan, at the end of World War Two, the United States had a sense of let’s help these nations to develop and become different kinds of nations. And, indeed, Germany and Japan, both of whom we fought against, are now our strongest allies and strongest economies that work with us to try to achieve good things. And that’s the kind of investment America was willing to make.

Do we help still? Yes, but nowhere near the scale that a twenty-seven-trillion-dollar or so economy should be able to do. We believe in freedom of people making innovative choices, and putting those innovations in the marketplace and, you know, it works. And yet we’re not doing it in a way that would help these other countries to break out. If we’re going to help these countries more, to make better choices about what kind of energy they will use for their development, we could be doing more through U.S.A.I.D. and other initiatives around the world. I think that would make a huge difference for America’s credibility for the stabilization of the planet.

One caveat here: no one banked on a brazen assault on the entire architecture of the post-World War Two world by Vladimir Putin, by invading another country, and putting the energy question in a place where it’s harder to make the choices we need to be making. But Germany has used it to great avail and is now about fifty-per-cent renewables in their energy system—and they’re a big industrial country. Most countries are in single digits, if that, in terms of deployment of renewables. It shows there’s a vast amount of space within which those countries could be deploying renewables now, and we should be in a position where we’re really helping them to do it. It would help our supply chains; it would lower the cost. It would put America in a much better light for what we are trying to do to help transition and meet our obligations.

Maybe the most famous thing you’ve ever said was in that congressional hearing as a young man speaking for your generation, when you said, “How can you ask someone to be the last man to die for a mistake?” If you were that age now, how would you be able to overcome cynicism about the society in which you live?

Exactly the same way I did back then, which is to get involved: to be up front, tell the truth to people, and try to organize around it. The first thing I got involved in when I came back from Vietnam was not protesting the war, because I was just trying to work through it all and figure out where I was. But I became involved in Earth Day, 1970. And, you know, the whole movement was inspired by Rachel Carson’s “ Silent Spring,” but also by the reality of life in New York or Los Angeles—in places where you couldn’t see across the city, where the air was putrid, and we were polluting everything. And the Cuyahoga River caught on fire, and so forth.

So young people got involved, put themselves on the line. Every major movement that I have ever seen or been part of has always been inspired by young people. And then maybe people fell asleep, or something, but that kind of engagement is what we need. We need young folks raising hell, as they are. I mean, Greta Thunberg and people who have been out there, and I think it’s had an impact. Some people are saying, Oh, God, I know it’s not going to make a difference, that the other guys are too big. They’re not. You can beat the money. You can beat it with people knocking on doors, getting people to do things. That still works. And we need more of it.

I felt really discouraged last month when big banks dropped out of the Climate Action 100 initiative [a group of financial firms focussed on persuading companies to be environmentally responsible], that people had endorsed such fanfare at Glasgow. The minute that kind of Greta Thunberg pressure was off, they were just back to “we don’t care.”

It’s the counter-movement—the folks who are calling everything “woke,” and putting it under the guise of cultural warfare, and the E.S.G. [environmental, social, and governance] pushback that’s coming in certain quarters and A.G.s [state attorneys general] who are threatening to sue some of these guys [asset managers]. I mean, we’re living in a real moment of—I’m looking for the right word here. Because I don’t want to be accused of being an élitist and calling someone else dumb. But there’s a lack of knowledge, a lack of due diligence, a lack of basic education on the issue of climate. It’s evident in these people who are choosing purposely to fight this cultural war and put climate into it, and it’s so sad, but the best antidote is just you gotta beat it at the polls.

This is why we were successful in 1970. That’s a good note to sort of wind this up on. We targeted the twelve [members with the worst voting records] in Congress. We labelled them the Dirty Dozen. We campaigned in their districts, and we organized behind their opponents. And in the election of 1970 seven of the Dirty Dozen lost their seats.

Guess what happened? Everybody else discovered religion—not real religion, voting religion. They discovered that you can get voted out of office because this is now a voting issue. So that’s what we have to do again, convince people you’re gonna lose your seat if you’re not with history, if you’re not on the right side of history, on the side of the vast majority of people in this country who want a better life. Last year, in the United States, there was a 3.8- or 3.9-per-cent growth in clean-energy jobs.

So it’s working, it’s happening. We just need it to come to scale, so much faster. We need to make it bigger, better, and more inventions coming faster, more money into R. & D., and more incentives for the transition itself to work. And we will win.

And, on the other side, you’ll have less people with cancer, less people dying of bad air quality, less threat that you have to send young people to another part of the world to defend the way you provide your energy. Life will be better, safer, cleaner, more secure, no question about it. ♦