Hill Heat

Speaking at the Davos World Economic Forum, US Climate Envoy John Kerry offered a strong critique of natural gas: “Gas is primarily methane, and we have a huge methane problem, folks.”

Kerry was responding to Shell CEO Ben van Breundel’s argument that the US government should reduce demand for fossil fuels and not take action to reduce production by companies like Shell.

UN Deputy Secretary General Amina Mohammed offered an even more blunt criticism of van Breundel’s argument that we can drill our way out of global warming: “You can’t be talking about new [fossil-fuel exploration and production], when the science tells you have to reduce that production 6 percent per annum and you’re increasing by 2 percent.”

Remarks by U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, John Kerry at the opening of the Climate Adaptation Summit 2021.

Transcript:

It’s a privilege to be able to be with you. And let me start by thanking Prime Minister Rutte and the government of the Netherlands for hosting this important and timely meeting.

I’m really delighted to be here. I also want to thank, if I may, Secretary General Guterres for his tireless leadership on climate change. And of course my friend Ban Ki-Moon, who was central as we negotiated the Paris agreement and brought it into force. And he’s been a partner not just on climate but on many other things and challenges.

Three years ago, scientists gave us a pretty stark warning. They said we have 12 years within which to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. Now we have nine years left. And I regret that my country has been absent for three of those years.

In the United States, we spent 265 billion dollars in one year for three storms, just cleaning up after those storms. Last year, one storm, 55 billion dollars.

We’ve reached the point where it is an absolute fact that it’s cheaper to invest in preventing damage, or minimizing it at least, than cleaning up. Now, without question, I think, everybody understands this, the best adaptation is to treat the crisis as the emergency that it is and do more to hold the earth’s temperature increase to the Paris-stated 1.5 degrees. I think scientists are more and more landing on the 1.5 as a critical figure.

A 3.7 to 4.5 increase centigrade, which is exactly the path that we are on now, invites for the most vulnerable and poorest people on earth fundamentally unlivable conditions. So our urgent reduction of emissions is compelled by public conscience and by common sense. President Biden has made fighting climate change a top priority of his administration. We have a president now, thank God, who leads, tells the truth, and is seized by this issue.

And President Biden knows that we have to mobilize in unprecedented ways to meet a challenge that is fast accelerating. And he knows we have limited time to get it under control. For that reason, the United States immediately rejoined the Paris agreement. And we intend to do everything we possibly can to ensure that COP26 results in ambitious climate action, in which all major-emitter countries raise ambitions significantly, and in which we help protect those who are the most vulnerable.

We have already launched our work to prepare a new U.S. nationally determined contribution that meets the urgency of the challenge. And we aim to announce our NDC as soon as practicable.

The administration also intends to make significant investments in climate action, both domestically and as part of our efforts to build back better from COVID. And internationally, we intend to make good on our climate finance pledge.

In the long term driving towards net zero emissions no later than 2050, and keeping a 1.5 degree limit within reach remain the best policies for climate resilience and adaptation. There is simply no adapting to a three or four degree world except for the very richest and most privileged. At the same time, we have to also build resilience to protect communities from the impacts of climate change that already built in to the emissions that are in the atmosphere.

Now some of these impacts are inevitable, because of the warming that’s already taken place. But if we don’t act boldly and immediately by building resilience to climate change, we are likely going to see dramatic reversals in economic development for everybody. Poor and climate-vulnerable communities everywhere will obviously pay the highest price.

So the United States will work on three fronts to promote ambition and resilience and adaptation: leverage U.S. innovation and climate data and information to promote a better understanding and management of climate risk, especially in developed countries; we will significantly increase the flow of finance, including concessional finance, to adaptation and resilience initiatives; we will work with bilateral and multilateral institutions to improve quality of resilience programming; and we will work with the private sector, in the United States and elsewhere in developing countries, to promote greater collaboration between businesses and the communities on which they depend.

And it is our firm conviction throughout all of our administration every agency is now part of our climate team. And only together are we going to be able to build the resilience to climate change that is critical to save lives and meet our moral obligation for future generations, and to those currently living in very difficult circumstances. So we’re proud to be back. We come back, I want you to know, with humility, for the absence of the last four years, and we’ll do everything in our power to make up for it.

President-elect Joe Biden has named former senator and Secretary of State John Kerry as his special envoy for climate, sitting on the National Security Council. Throughout his long career of public service, Kerry has been an ardent environmentalist who seeks to find common ground through diplomacy. His approach has found greater success on the international stage than with American conservatives, despite repeated attempts.

As a Massachusetts senator, Kerry worked desperately to salvage climate legislation when it was abandoned by the Obama White House following the Tea Party uprising of 2009. Lacking a unified Democratic caucus, Kerry tried without success to find Republican votes for climate legislation by working with former running mate Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

As Obama’s second Secretary of State, John Kerry’s diplomatic leadership was key to the successful Paris agreement, which marked a dramatic turnaround from the 2009 debacle of the Copenhagen climate talks. His support for killing the Canada-to-US Keystone XL tar-sands pipeline – in response to powerful pressure from climate activists – was also a change in direction from Kerry’s predecessor Hillary Clinton, who fast-tracked the permit process for the project. Like Clinton, however, Secretary of State Kerry was bullish on fracking as a means of energy diplomacy, despite its threat to the climate.

Kerry’s diplomatic approach has borne less fruit at home. Republicans such as Newt Gingrich and Donald Trump mocked Secretary Kerry for calling global warming “perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction,” presaging the burn-it-all-down Trump presidency.

During the Trump years, Kerry founded a new organization called World War Zero, still attempting to find Republicans to get on board with climate action. Although Kerry’s organization supposedly intends to build a broad coalition of climate activists, World War Zero’s Republican participants include climate-science skeptic John Kasich, who mocks youth climate activists and vilifies the Green New Deal.

In his role Kerry will face several challenges unresolved by previous administrations. To date, immigration, trade, peace, and climate policy have been treated as wholly distinct milieus by government and advocates alike. Remarkably, even energy and climate diplomacy have largely operated on parallel tracks, with clashing agendas.

A critical test will be whether Kerry has say over international trade agreements which have always trumped climate negotiations. The so-called free-trade agenda has rendered international climate deals moot.

Similarly, it remains to be seen if Kerry will be an effective spokesman for the global South as it is ravaged by fossil-fueled storms and floods and drought, destabilizing governments and fueling the global migration crisis.

The military euphemism is that climate pollution is a “threat multiplier” – in other words, global conflict is now defined by the devastation to human civilization that results from the industrial destabilization of a habitable climate.

In response to this rising destabilization, right-wing movements around the globe have seized on the politics of militarized nativism and environmental exploitation, described approvingly by white-nationalist ecologist Garrett Hardin as “lifeboat ethics” in 1974.

One hopes that Kerry’s position on the National Security Council could mean the US military may shift away from its longtime role as the armed protection for the global oil industry. Kerry is highly interested in the military’s role during the Anthropocene. With his World War Zero campaign, Kerry has brought together a long list of military brass and former Defense Department officials.

Unfortunately, the primary narrative for climate policy within military circles is one of responding to the rising threats of climate destruction, with little to no engagement in ending climate pollution.

Of course, Kerry can’t guide international climate policy on his own. The makeup of Biden’s team will determine what is possible.

Rahm Emanuel, the neoliberal who was instrumental in killing White House support for climate legislation as Obama’s chief of staff, is being considered for U.S. Trade Representative. His selection would be a devastating setback.

Biden campaign advisor Heather Zichal, who has become notorious for joining the fracked-gas industry after leaving the Obama White House, came to prominence as the top Kerry climate policy staffer on his presidential campaign and in his Senate office. Zichal has been mentioned as a possible high-level staffer in the Biden White House despite broad opposition from climate activists.

Biden’s pick for Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, began his career studying fossil-fuel geopolitics. He wrote his dissertation in the 1980s on the Siberian pipeline crisis, in which the Reagan administration imposed far-reaching sanctions on oil-sector technology sharing in an attempt to block the pipeline’s construction. Blinken criticized the sanctions effort. His career since has been interventionist and pro-fossil-fuel development.

Surmounting the challenges of being Biden’s international climate czar will be a life-defining test for the 76-year-old statesman.

In a passionate address yesterday, Secretary of State John Kerry called inaction on carbon pollution “just plain immoral,” as it is “gambling with the future of Earth itself.” Kerry’s remarks were made at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C., setting the stage for this December’s international climate negotiations in Paris.

“Lincoln took risks, Gandhi took risks, Churchill took risks, Dr. King took risks, Mandela took risks, but that doesn’t mean that every risk-taker is a role model. It’s one thing to risk a career or a life on behalf of a principle or to save or liberate a population,” Kerry said. “It’s quite another to wager the well-being of generations and life itself simply to continue satisfying the appetites of the present or to insist on a course of inaction long after all the available evidence has pointed to the folly of that path.”

“Gambling with the future of Earth itself when we know full well what the outcome would be is beyond reckless,” he continued. “It is just plain immoral.”

“And it is a risk that no one should take. We need to face reality. There is no planet B.”

Kerry also called for a renewed global commitment to cutting carbon pollution to avoid the 2-degree-Celsius warming threshold agreed to by President Obama. Using language that could have practical policy implications, Kerry argued that energy-investment decisions must “include the long-term cost of carbon pollution.”

It is time, my friends, for people to do real cost accounting. The bottom line is that we can’t only factor in the price of immediate energy needs. We have to include the long-term cost of carbon pollution. We have to factor in the cost of survival. And if we do, we will find that pursuing clean energy now is far more affordable than paying for the consequences of climate change later.

Such decisions notably include the long-awaited Presidential determination on the Keystone XL tar-sands pipeline, which if built would have the carbon-pollution impact of 40 new coal-fired power plants.

The Secretary of State made reference to the news uncovered by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting that Florida governor Rick Scott’s administration censored use of the words “climate change,” “global warming,” and “sea level rise.”

So when science tells us that our climate is changing and humans beings are largely causing that change, by what right do people stand up and just say, “Well, I dispute that” or “I deny that elementary truth?” And yet, there are those who do so. Literally a couple of days ago, I read about some state officials who are actually trying to ban the use of the term “climate change” in public documents because they’re not willing to face the facts.

Now folks, we literally do not have the time to waste debating whether we can say “climate change.” We have to talk about how we solve climate change. Because no matter how much people want to bury their heads in the sand, it will not alter the fact that 97 percent of peer-reviewed climate studies confirm that climate change is happening and that human activity is largely responsible. I have been involved in public policy debates now for 40-plus years, whatever, since the 1960s. It is rare, rare, rare – I can tell you after 28 years-plus in the Senate – to get a super majority of studies to agree on anything. But 97 percent, over 20-plus years – that’s a dramatic statement of fact that no one of good conscience has a right to ignore.

Climate activist group Forecast the Facts is petitioning for an investigation.

Kerry’s speech had one factual misstep – he claimed that the first Senate hearings on climate change were held in 1988, when Dr. James Hansen famously warned Congress that global warming was already measurably affecting the climate.

Climate change is an issue that is personal to me, and it has been since the 1980s, when we were organizing the very first climate hearings in the Senate. In fact, it really predates that, going back to Earth Day when I’d come back from Vietnam. It was the first political thing I began to organize in Massachusetts, when citizens started to make a solid statement in this country. And I might add that’s before we even had an Environmental Protection Agency or a Clean Water Act or Safe Drinking Water Act or a Marine Mammal Protection Act or a Coastal Zone Management Act. It all came out of that kind of citizen movement. And that’s what we have to be involved in now. And the reason for that is simple: For decades now, the science has been screaming at us, warning us, trying to compel us to act.

And I just want to underscore that for a moment. It may seem obvious to you, but it isn’t to some. Science is and has long been crystal clear when it comes to climate change. Al Gore, Tim Wirth, and a group of us organized the first hearings in the Senate on this, 1988. We heard Jim Hansen stand in – sit in front of us and tell us it’s happening now, 1988. So we’re not talking about news reports or blog posts or even speeches that some cabinet secretary might give at a think tank. We’re talking about a fact-based, evidence-supported, peer-reviewed science. And yet, if you listen to some people in Washington or elsewhere, you’d think there’s a question about whether climate change really is a problem or whether we really need to respond to it.

In fact, the first Senate hearings on climate change were 11 years earlier in 1977, when the science subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Technology held a series of four hearings on the National Climate Program Act. The first House hearings on the same act of legislation were a year earlier.

The risk of fossil-fueled climate change was brought to the Congress’s attention by President Lyndon B. Johnson in his February 8, 1965 address on the environment, now over fifty years ago.

Transcript of full remarks:

398 youth activists were arrested Sunday in front of the White House, after staging a “die-in” protest against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. The protesters marched from the Georgetown University site of President Barack Obama’s 2013 climate speech to the street in front of Secretary of State John Kerry’s house before arriving at the White House. Kerry is slated to make a decision on on whether the pipeline — which will unlock access to Canadian tar sands and have a carbon footprint equivalent to fifty new coal-fired power plants — is in the national interest. President Obama is responsible for the final determination.

“We are trying to escalate as much as we can,” Michael Greenberg, a Columbia University sophomore who helped organize Sunday’s protest, told the National Journal’s Ben Geman. “We are not playing softball with the president any more.”

“Young people are tired of watching a president who ran on the promise of ‘ending the tyranny of oil’ keep caving to the fossil fuel industry,” wrote Jamie Henn, Communications Director for 350 Action, at MSNBC.com

There is a Flickr set of XLDissent photographs, and Annie-Rose Strasser at Climate Progress has compiled photos from Twitter of the march and protest.

“An entire movement has thrown itself into in this Keystone fight, from local frontline groups to big national green organizations,” said 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben. “But this weekend shows the power and bravery of some of the most crucial elements: young people, and activists who understand the centrality of environmental justice.”

Former climate hawk Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on Tuesday ridiculed Secretary of State John Kerry for treating climate change as a serious foreign policy issue and national security threat, as he once did himself.

Appearing on Phoenix radio station KFYI’s The Mike Broomhead Show, McCain said:

Why should he talk about climate change when we’ve got 130,000 people in Syria killed, and, as I predicted on this show many times, when the Geneva thing is a fiasco, and the US-Iran talks are obviously a joke, and the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations haven’t even begun? John Kerry and the president, they could be hitting the trifecta here, gross failure in all three. So he has to go over to Asia and talk about climate change and say it’s the most important issue? Hello? On what planet does he reside?

“Kerry is obviously butterflying around the world,” McCain added, “saying all kinds of things.”

As Nicholas Stern, the U.S. Department of Defense, and many others have pointed out, rapidly accelerating global climate change is a “threat multiplier,” a destabilizing force that increases the risk of armed conflict over degraded resources and forced mass migrations. We are already seeing this in action, experts point out. For example, the polluted climate helped precipitate the ongoing Syrian conflict. Climate change poses “real security concerns” to the Middle East, the International Institute of Sustainable Development cautioned in 2009.

Ten years ago, McCain was criticizing John Kerry for not talking enough about the threat of global warming.

In 2004, McCain described the threat of global warming as “very, very serious” and challenged John Kerry to talk about the issue on the campaign trail.

McCain continued for years, until his failed run for the presidency in 2008 led him towards climate denial, to speak with passion about the importance of taking action on the climate crisis. In 2006, McCain called climate inaction “a crime to our children and grandchildren.” In 2007, McCain claimed he would make climate change a “top agenda” because “it’s such a threat to our planet and our future and our children.” In a 2007 GOP presidential debate, McCain said that he would establish “a national security requirement that we reduce and eliminate our dependence on foreign oil — and we stop the contamination of our atmosphere, which is climate change, which is real and is taking place.”

In 2008, McCain said the “facts of global warming demand our urgent attention, especially in Washington” and that “global warming presents a test of foresight, of political courage, and of the unselfish concern that one generation owes to the next. “

CNN personality Newt Gingrich lambasted John “Kerrey” in a series of tweets on Monday for the Secretary of State’s recent remarks on climate change. Secretary Kerry said that global warming is “perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.”

Gingrich’s position on global warming has repeatedly flipped. In a 2007 appearance with then-Senator Kerry, Gingrich said action on carbon pollution should be taken “urgently.” This week, he called for Kerry’s resignation for making similar comments in a series of misspelled tweets.

“The most direct reaction to kerrey’s global warming speech is to ask if he is completely out of touch with reality.”

“If kerrey believes his global warming speech it is a terrifying prospect for American policy. He is making policy in a fantasy world”

“Does kerrey really believe global warming more dangerous than north Korean and iranian nukes? More than Russian and Chinese nukes? Really? ?”

“Every American who cares about national security must.demand Kerrey’s resignation.A delusional secretary of state is dangerous to our safety”

Gingrich’s criticism of Kerry could be caught in the crossfire of previous Gingrich remarks, as he has argued that climate change is a serious threat in previous years. In 1989, Gingrich co-sponsored legislation saying “global warming imperils human health and well-being” and represents “a major threat to political stability, international security, and economic prosperity.” In 2007, Gingrich said “mandatory carbon caps” is “something I would strongly support.”

Most notably, Gingrich stood on stage with Kerry in 2007, saying that the country should “urgently” take “most effective possible steps to reduce carbon-loading of the atmosphere,” calling himself a “green conservative.”

Please join us at our upcoming Senate briefing, bringing together four prominent scientists and four leading evangelical Christians to share their concerns about climate change. Rarely have these two groups spoken with one voice, but they are coming together with a shared sense of urgency about the profound implications of climate change for human health and for the natural support systems that sustain all life on Earth, and about the political paralysis in Washington on this issue. 



Speakers

• Dr. Eric Chivian, Director, Center for Health and the Global Environment, Harvard Medical School
• Rev. Richard Cizik, President, New Evangelicals
• Dr. Jim McCarthy, Alexander Agassiz Progressor of Biological Oceanography, Harvard University
• Rev. Joel Hunter, Senior Pastor, Northland Church, Chairman of the Creation Care Advisory Team, National Association of Evangelicals
• Dr. Nancy Knowlton, Sant Chair for Marine Science, Smithsonian Natural Museum of History
• Rev. Gerald Durley, Senior Pastor, Providence Missionary Baptist Church of Atlanta
• Deborah Fikes, Executive Advisor, World Evangelical Alliance
• Dr. Tom Lovejoy, chief biodiversity adviser to the president of the World Bank, senior adviser to the president of the United Nations Foundation, and president of the Heinz Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment

Host: Sen. John Kerry

Speakers:

• Rev. Yearwood, Hip Hop Caucus
• Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, Green For All

Dial-In Number: 1-866-931-7845
Conference Code: 727028