John Kerry, a former U.S. senator and secretary of state, is now a kind of pedigreed traveling salesman for the environment, shuttling from country to country, with an urgent pitch to save the planet.
U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry attends a briefing at the White House in Washington, April 22, 2021.
Kerry’s mission is further complicated by political fissures at home and the fact that Biden’s ambitious climate agenda may not survive a divided Congress. Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said signs do not portend well for Kerry’s efforts and the looming U.N. summit in November. “Glasgow will come up short,” he predicted.
The goal at Glasgow is to compel the biggest polluting countries to commit to action that is more ambitious than outlined in the Paris accord.“I’m an optimist,” he said. “I think most of the problems on Earth are caused by human beings. And if we cause them, we ought to be able to solve them or prevent them.”As a senator from Massachusetts, Kerry attended the first U.N.
So he initiated secret negotiations, including hosting Chinese leaders at a Legal Sea Foods restaurant on the docks of Boston Harbor. That laid the groundwork for a joint pledge in 2014 by the United States and China to cut emissions, albeit at different paces. The following year in Paris, nations took the unprecedented step of pledging climate action in their own countries — an accord that Kerry helped craft.
Aides say he is focused on details, texting his staff late into the night to seek a country’s solar capacity statistics or economic data or with more obscure questions, like Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s stated spiritual connection to environmental issues. Retirement never suited Kerry, who wants to be in the arena, said Thomas Vallely, a longtime friend who is a senior adviser for Mainland Southeast Asia at Harvard University’s Ash Center. “This is like bullfighting. He’s addicted.”
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