Consider This from NPR - Is Catastrophic Climate Change Inevitable? We Ask Outgoing Climate Chief Kerry

Episode Date: March 9, 2024

As John Kerry leaves his role as the first Presidential Envoy for Climate, has he helped shift us away from climate disaster?Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

They were asking, how do you know you live with the climate crisis? And I said, well, I can recall the smell of mud. At the UN Climate Summit in Glasgow, Scotland a few years ago, I met a young activist from Samoa named Brianna Fruin. I don't know if you've ever been like a storm or a flood, but when the flood drains back into the ocean, it leaves piles and piles of mud. And so I've scooped mud out of my house. More than 10,000 miles away from Samoa,

people in Uganda feel the effects of climate change in different ways. Vanessa Nakate is a climate activist from Kampala. So with the rising global temperatures, it means that there's loss of people's farms, drying of people's crops, destruction of people's houses. The climate crisis is a health crisis, and it's hurting our patients now. And in her work as a pediatrician, Dr. Harleen Mawa sees the effects of climate change on her patients in Philadelphia. Pregnant women are impacted by things like air pollution, extreme heat.

It puts the developing baby at higher risk for preterm birth or low birth weight. For people all over the world, climate change is not just a future threat. It is a present-day reality. Each of the women we just heard from have attended COP, the annual UN climate conference, where people from nearly every country on earth gather to discuss solutions. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres spoke at last year's conference in Dubai. We are miles from the goals of the Paris Agreement and minutes to midnight for the 1.5 degree limit. But it is not too late. We can, you can prevent planetary crash and burn.

For three years, John Kerry has led the U.S. global strategy to fight climate change, traveling the world, brokering deals with government leaders and corporations to reduce the use of fossil fuels in hopes of keeping global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius. Here he was last year at the climate summit. I'm happy to report that the United States has stepped up under President Biden's leadership. Consider this. John Kerry stepped down this week as the president's climate envoy.

Has he helped steer the world onto a path that could avoid the worst impacts of climate change? From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Saturday, March 9th. It's Consider This from NPR. John Kerry has been a U.S. Senator, a presidential candidate, and a Secretary of State, all after receiving three Purple Hearts for his military service in Vietnam. Now at the age of 80, he is stepping down from what's likely his last full-time job in government, the president's special envoy for climate. Biden created the position for his old

friend right after taking office three years ago. Since then, Kerry's been all over the world trying to rally governments and corporations to curb the worst impacts of climate change. Secretary Kerry, thanks for joining us for an exit interview. I'm delighted to be with you, Ari. Thank you. I know you have piles of figures and data at your fingertips to demonstrate the progress of the last few years. But could you begin by just choosing one number, a specific narrow figure that you think represents some of the broader accomplishments of your time as a climate envoy? I think the one number is the 1.5 degrees Celsius, which has now become the north star of the world of trying to deal with the climate crisis. The fact is that when we left Paris in 2015, having passed the Paris Agreement, the language for the aspirational goal was

well below two degrees and try to do 1.5. But in 2018, the IPCC, the UN scientific panel, told us point blank, we have 12 years within which to make and implement the critical decisions to avoid the worst consequences of the climate crisis. And in order to do that, you have to try to get as close as you can, 1.5 or as close as you can. And yet right now, the world is on track to warm the planet by twice that many degrees by the end of the century. And last year, like many recently, was the hottest in recorded history. Global emissions keep going up. It would seem that although you have worked so hard to keep the potential for 1.5 within reach, the reality is far from that.

Well, it's not far from that, but it's not that. I mean, point blank, we are heading towards about 2.5 degrees right now. But given what we achieved in Glasgow and Trimel-Sheik and now most recently the UAE consensus, we now know to a certainty that if we implemented all of the initiatives and all of the targets that were set by those various meetings, we could actually hold the Earth's temperature increase to about 1.7 degrees. When I took this job on, we were headed towards 4 degrees. And now if we're heading towards 2.5, and we know that if we implement everything that we have promised to do, for instance, methane, we never talked about methane in Paris.

And methane became part of the conversation when President Biden joined with Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission. And together they announced in Glasgow that we're all going to be working towards dealing with methane. Methane is responsible for half the warming of the planet. It's 80 to 100 times more destructive than CO2. So we've plugged a huge hole here. I want to follow up on something you said, which is that things look really good if we keep the promises we've made, if countries stick to their pledges. Dubai was, by you and your team, considered a great success because for the first time, the world agreed that we need to move away from fossil fuels. But at the same time, China is building more

coal-fired power plants and the U.S. emissions are not falling fast enough to meet American climate goals. And so what leads you to believe that these promises will be kept? I mean, yes, China has about 360 gigawatts of coal-fired power that is slated to come online or be built. And that would be catastrophic if that's what happens. But China is, I think, to some degree hedging against the reality of what their economy needs as a backstop. But they're building, they're constructing and deploying more renewables than all of the rest of the world put together. You think the coal plants are a just-in-case, break glass-in-case of emergency that might never be used?

That's what they say to us. And that's what begins to be a possibility as you look at the massive amount of renewable that's being deployed. China is looking at something like 2,500 to 3,500 gigawatts of power that's going to be created over the course of the next six years. Now, that's game-changing if that happens. I want to ask you about corporations because you've often talked about the role that private industry plays in the transition away from carbon. And just this week, the CEO of ExxonMobil, Darren Woods, told Fortune magazine that the world is not on track to reach net zero emissions by 2050. And he blamed the public for that, saying, quote, the people who are generating those emissions need to be aware of and pay the price for generating those emissions.

Secretary Kerry, when you hear those words coming from the head of the largest publicly traded oil company, blaming the public for a lack of climate progress. How do you conclude that corporate America is marching alongside you? Well, I haven't suggested that everybody is. I've said to you that there are many corporations that are doing unbelievable things right now. But ExxonMobil is a pretty big one. ExxonMobil is an oil and gas producer that has not yet joined in some of the larger initiatives that we need in order to achieve our goal. And ExxonMobil did step up in Dubai, but we need them to do more. Yes, we do. And that's one of the reasons why I'm transitioning out of this particular job,

because I think that now the private sector is going to be the key to our ability to be able to win this battle. So you're giving up the job title, but you're not giving up the fight. Correct. I'm going to be directly involved in trying to help deploy the financing, which will accelerate this transition. All the finance reports say, if you want to achieve net zero 2050, then it's going to cost about two and a half to four and a half, five trillion dollars a year for the next 30 years. No government in the world, no government in the world has that money put on the table. But the private sector does.

Let me just ask, can the push to achieve net zero by 2050 survive a second term of Donald Trump as president if he wins the election in November? Well, let me answer that this way. When Donald Trump was president, even though he pulled out of Paris, more than a thousand mayors in the United States kept on track to meet the Paris Agreement requirements. More than 37 governors out of our 50 states, Republican and Democrat-like, continued to adhere to the renewable portfolio laws of each of their states. So even while Donald Trump was pulled out of the agreement, the fact is the American people

stayed in the Paris Agreement. And through those mayors and those governors and those states, we actually saw 75% of the new electricity in America during Donald Trump came from renewables. And yet I'm sure you believe that who is in the White House matters for the course of American climate policy. Absolutely it matters because you can screw up the EPA, you can put the wrong person in an interior or agriculture. So yes, it does matter who is president, but they can't stop. No one prime minister, one king, one president anywhere in the world is able to stop what the marketplace of the world is now moving towards. You have been involved in climate and environmental efforts for more than 50 years, since at least 1970. And so what do you do when you have a day

of despair or hopelessness? I kick myself in the ass and get rid of the hopelessness and go back to work. We can win this fight. And if we don't do what we need to do between now and 2030, the next six years, there is no net zero 2050. And I refuse to believe that that's what we're left having to accept. John Kerry, the first U.S. special envoyvoy for Climate. Thank you so much for speaking with us again. Thank you. Great to be with you. This episode was produced by Kai McNamee and

Mark Rivers. It was edited by William Troop and Jeanette Woods. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.