High stakes climate diplomacy By Akshat Rathi and Jennifer A. Dlouhy
John Kerry in retrospect is a trail of tears and futility writ large.
High stakes climate diplomacy
By Akshat Rathi and Jennifer A. Dlouhy
John Kerry is stepping down as the US’s chief climate diplomat on Wednesday. This week we looked back at his three years in the role and how he sought to rebuild the country’s credibility on climate action.
No matter your politics, Kerry’s tactics were bold. Some of them were also controversial. Nothing better exemplified that more than Kerry’s move to court China as a partner to fight global warming.
If Kerry were an elected official at the time, this could have easily been political no-go. It was early 2021 and tensions between the two superpowers were high, inflamed by trade fights under former President Donald Trump.
Kerry first had to persuade President Joe Biden and key administration officials to keep the door open for climate talks with China, arguing the only way to keep warming below 1.5C was if the two biggest polluters found a way to collaborate.
Yet getting climate negotiators from China and the US in the same room wasn’t just a political gamble. There were health concerns involved too.
The world was still fearful of Covid-19. China had instituted one of the strictest pandemic lockdowns of any country, and an April 2021 meeting required “extraordinary commitment” from both sides, said Jonathan Pershing, then a deputy in Kerry’s team and now program director of environment at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
There were no commercial flights going into China at the time, Pershing said, so the US team took military planes for the two-day trip. The meeting was held in Beijing with a team led by then climate envoy Xie Zhenhua, who Kerry counts as a friend. Following the visit, the entire Chinese delegation went into a two-week quarantine.
Xie Zhenhua, China’s then special envoy for climate change, left, and Kerry at the COP28 climate conference in Dubai on Dec. 2, 2023. Photographer: Hollie Adams/Bloomberg
“I don’t think they would have done it for anyone,” said Pershing. “They did it because they wanted to move, and they trusted Kerry to be a fair and constructive facilitator on the US side.” The trip could also not have happened without the direct approval of Biden and China’s President Xi Jingping, he added.
Kerry leveraged those negotiations and his long relationship with Xie to forge a 2021 commitment to collaborate and boost ambition at COP26 in Glasgow. And though talks were frozen for months after former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 2022 visit to Taiwan, Kerry was insistent about the need to restart them. That tenacity ultimately drove joint promises in 2023 to back global efforts to triple renewable energy capacity by the end of this decade and accelerate the domestic buildout of green power to replace coal, oil and gas. Key portions of the US-China joint statement made in November last year were incorporated in the final COP28 declaration in Dubai.
At all times, Kerry was aware of the divided politics back home. Without robust deals in place, Trump’s potential return to the White House in 2024 could undo much of his work. That’s why he and his team also developed initiatives uniting smaller groups of countries in commitments to slash methane emissions and make agriculture more climate friendly. And he even worked to convince big public companies to commit to buying carbon-free products, such as steel and aviation fuels, to lower costs and to enable more expensive green solutions to find a market.
Still, nothing compares with the high stakes around China. And despite tensions between the two major economic powers over the past few years, there was arguably never a better time for their collaboration on climate. Now that Kerry leaves the role and the prospect of Trump’s return clouds his progress on the issue, the big question is how long it will last.
Read Bloomberg Green’s full story on Kerry’s envoy role here. Also, listen to Akshat Rathi’s conversation with Kerry on the Zero podcast.
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Kerry is a bloated government mouthpiece to take money from everyone! How much did he get done! Stole a bunch of money from 🇺🇸 USA 🇺🇸