US Climate Envoy John Kerry said the world can still win the fight against climate change, and the upcoming United Nations summit will be “absolutely critical” to that.
Urgency was the central message of Kerry’s speech at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore just weeks ahead of the COP28 summit in Dubai. The world needs to stop building coal power plants and rapidly accelerate its deployment of wind and solar, he said. At the same time, rich nations need to start making funds available for the damage that climate change is already unleashing on poorer countries.
“COP28 is absolutely critical to open up the opportunity to keep 1.5 alive,” Kerry said, referring to the limit on temperature increases agreed in Paris in 2015. “We can win. This is actually winnable, but only if we do the things we said we’d do.”
Kerry’s comments swung from hopefulness at the innovation he’s seen in clean technology to despair at political gridlock in Washington DC and past missed opportunities to slow the pace of planetary warming. The world is already beset by increasingly frequent and intense extreme weather, he said.
“This year is going to be worse than last year, and next year is going to be worse than this year,” he said. “It’s baked in with the rising temperatures.”
Sunnylands Huddle
Before his trip to Singapore, Kerry spent five days in Sunnylands, California, negotiating with his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua. The talks resulted in some “very solid understandings and agreements,” Kerry said. He hopes to release results from the meetings soon that will “help the world by focusing on renewables and other things.”
The meetings with Xie drew wide interest because progress on major global climate policy in the past decade has often been foreshadowed by agreements between the world’s two largest economies. Xie and Kerry hammered out a joint statement in 2014 that set the stage for the landmark Paris Agreement a year later.
A plan published Tuesday by China, the world’s largest emitter of methane, to reduce releases of the super-potent greenhouse gas is a “good starting point,” Kerry said, adding that the US would work with Beijing on how to strengthen parts of the policy.
Kerry, who will mark his 80th birthday at COP28, said the private sector is clearly moving toward a low-carbon future. US carmakers that are investing in electric vehicle manufacturing won’t turn around in a few years and start making new models based on the internal combustion engine again, he said.
“We will wind up with, sometime in this century, a low-carbon, no-carbon economy,” he said. “What is not certain is that we will wind up there with the speed necessary to avoid the worst consequences of this crisis.”
Kerry also said he was concerned with the progress of the Just Energy Transition Partnership that the US helped negotiate with Indonesia to provide billions of dollars in international funding to accelerate that country’s shift from coal power. He said he hopes the US can identify the challenges associated with starting such a new initiative, and apply it in agreements with Vietnam and other countries.
“I think Indonesia could go faster, and we’re working with them to see how to make that happen,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg Television.
--With assistance from Haslinda Amin, Sheryl Tian Tong Lee, Alfred Cang and Tassia Sipahutar.