John Kerry speaks during an interview with Reuters after meeting with Pope Francis, near the Vatican in Rome, Italy, on June 19.GUGLIELMO MANGIAPANE/Reuters
Last week, it was Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. This week, it is former secretary of state John Kerry.
Last week, we experienced what likely were the three hottest days in modern history. This week the temperature reached 46 degrees in Phoenix.
And so in this context, the appearance in Beijing of an American tag team – first a former chair of the Federal Reserve Bank, then a onetime Democratic presidential nominee – is not so remarkable. Indeed, it is a hot summertime reflection of the prevailing climate, environmental and political.
Ms. Yellen asked for Chinese co-operation in the Green Climate Fund and the Climate Investment Funds, arguing, “we have a duty to both our own countries and to other countries to co-operate.” Mr. Kerry, President Joe Biden’s climate envoy, is about to mount his third pilgrimage to Beijing, seeking to resume climate talks that were broken off nearly a year ago. The primary emphasis of earlier high-level American diplomatic meetings between officials of the two countries, in May in Vienna by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and last month in Beijing by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, was on global strategic issues.
On environmental issues, “China is critical,” Mr. Kerry said in a telephone interview from London, where he was involved in President Biden’s meeting with King Charles and prepping for his own sessions with, among others, Xie Zhenhua, his Chinese counterpart. “It’s the second-largest economy in the world and largest emitter of gases, while we are the largest economy and the number-two emitter of gasses. The two largest emitters are essential. No one country can do this. No ten countries can do this. Everybody has to be involved.”
In the Senate, where he represented Massachusetts from 1985 to 2013, Mr. Kerry complied a 91 per cent lifetime proenvironmental score from the League of Conservation Voters. He supported clean energy funding in 2010 and water-conservation legislation in 2009 and opposed offshore drilling in 2009 and 2011 and oil-shale development in 2008. In 2016, he signed the Paris Climate Accords – the very agreement that Donald Trump repudiated in his first five months in the White House.
“I hope people sense the urgency now,” Mr. Kerry said in the interview. “It’s not there in certain quarters, but clearly it is gaining traction among the public with the extreme conditions and because scientists now are saying they are terrified that they are in uncharted territory.”
Climate change has been on the American agenda for more than a half-century, dating to Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 remark that “this generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale” because of “a steady increase in the amount of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.” Even so, while the crisis has deepened, many conventional American politicians have not displayed urgency matching that of environmental activists worldwide, who also have expressed impatience with the response from Beijing.
“I hope we can break through,” Mr. Kerry said. “This is a chance to manage an oncoming transformation in a way that minimizes the damage and maximizes the opportunity. This is the greatest economic opportunity since the Industrial Revolution. We can have electric charging stations, we can build out new grid, we can build the economic system of the future just as we built the economic system of the Industrial Revolution.”
In The Parrot and the Igloo, published earlier this year, David Lipsky traced climate-change denial in industry and politics and the peaks and valleys of interest in global warming. One significant spurt of interest came, largely at the initiation of vice president Al Gore, during the Bill Clinton administration but, Mr. Lipsky, argued, “the year’s words were Monica Lewinsky, blue dress, impeachment.”
Now there is fresh urgency for the issue throughout North America.
More than two months before this summer’s record-setting temperatures, the Pew Research Center found that more than two-thirds of Americans favour taking steps to meet Mr. Biden’s goal of becoming carbon-neutral by 2050. A similar share of Americans believe the country should make developing renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, a priority over expanding oil, coal and natural-gas production. Nearly four in 10 Americans in the Eastern United States say they have adjusted their travel plans, or are considering doing so, as a result of the Quebec fires, according to a CivicScience digital survey. And a poll the Ottawa-based Abacus Data conducted last month for the Clean Energy Canada group found that 86 per cent of Canadians said a good plan for addressing climate change and growing Canada’s clean economy would have an impact on how they vote.
Mr. Kerry, who has met with Chinese officials at Davos, Berlin and Stockholm as well as twice in Beijing argued that, just as the transformations prompted by the Industrial Revolution created economic opportunity, the new green industries could have the same impact.
“Every economy will be involved in the transformation,” he said. “We have all kinds of transportation systems that can be built. A lot of the developing world wants to develop in a thoughtful way and in their development plans they are waiting. There is a huge amount of sustainable development to be done.”
The key, Mr. Kerry said, was to persuade Chinese officials that climate change isn’t a Western obsession and that fighting it should be the preoccupation of Beijing.
“Listen, China is as affected as we are,” he said. “Their citizens don’t want extreme heat. They are increasingly engaged in dealing with this. They are the world’s largest emitters of emissions. They are the world’s largest employer of renewables. The question is whether we are all doing enough fast enough. We need ways of co-operating.”