The New Yorker Radio Hour - John Kerry on the Battle Against Climate Change

Episode Date: July 30, 2021

With the world overheating, glaciers melting, and landscapes in flames, it’s difficult to think of a harder or more important job than John Kerry’s. The former senator and Secretary of State is now the special Presidential envoy for climate, a Cabinet-level post created by President Biden. Kerry talks with David Remnick about reasserting the United States’ fitness to lead on global climate action in the wake of Trump Administration policies, and about how to get allies and adversaries to engage in the battle together. He is heading to Glasgow for talks that aim to hold the warming level to 1.5 degrees Celsius. “Imagine what happens at 1.5, if you already see what’s happening at 1.2,” Kerry exclaims. “Is that what we want? You would think not!” Plus, an evangelical historian who is the wife of a pastor breaks from her church’s doctrine, arguing that Biblical readings of female submission are mistakes. She has felt the personal consequences of taking this stance. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Some years back during the Obama administration, I spent a lot of time interviewing Secretary of State John Kerry for a profile that we published at the end of 2015. He was trying to talk down tensions between Israel and the Palestinians and to broker a peace in Syria. Carrie seemed to relish jobs that others might think absolutely impossible. He is considered relentless, I wrote in 2015, sometimes to a fault. There's no concealing his eagerness to make a deal. To a critic, his style is reminiscent of the customer who sternly tells the salesman,

I'm not leaving here until you sell me a car. But if peace in the Middle East certainly alluded Carrie, his current project seems a great deal harder still. Kerry is now serving as the special envoy for climate, a cabinet-level post created by President Biden. Carrie needs to reverse our standing in the world on climate policy following four years of Trump's denialism, and the clock is ticking even louder as the effects of climate change become brutally apparent to us all over the world. I spoke with John Kerry last week. You were just in Europe to drum up support for climate action in advance of talks in October and

which are essential. You've said that these are the last chance to keep temperature rises below 1.5 degrees Celsius. What is your sense of the state of the world on this, the sense of the sense of urgency, because, you know, we're constantly getting warnings. This is the last chance. This is the last chance. And here we are in a summer of what seems to be apocalyptic conditions already. Well, they are apocalyptic. And it's more serious. than it's ever been at a time that it seems as if some key nations are just unwilling to do their part, to bite the bullet and step up. So let me put that on perspective.

At the summit that President Biden hosted last April, we had about 40 nations there, but we had the 20 largest economies who happened to also be the largest emitters of C.O. more or less the 20 largest. Well, 55% of global GDP out of that meeting committed to try to hold the Earth's temperature to the 1.5 degrees. And 45% therefore did not.

And that includes China, Russia, India, South Africa, Brazil, a host of countries. So we have to move those countries. And David, if we don't get them to buy in to fast reductions from 2020 to 2030, 1.5 degrees is dead. You won't be able to achieve it.

1.5 degrees centigrade. 1.5 degrees centigrade limit on the rise of Earth's temperature. So I do view this personally. After a 30-year journey on this, I view this as the last best hope for the world to get serious and make the decisions necessary to try to reduce and hold the 1.5. And even 1.5. Imagine what happens at 1.5 if you already see what's happening at 1.2. Is that what we want? You would think not. Describe for me what it's like to talk to the Chinese on these issues.

What is the dynamic, what is the back and forth that occurs? What is their rationale, as you understand it? I mean, China, for instance, is a contradiction because China has deployed more renewables than any other country in the world. But China has used an extraordinary amount of fossil fuel to get where it is in its economy. China's rationale is that they are doing a great deal, that they're doing more than most developing. They consider themselves a developing country still. And they posture that a developing country has a right at this point to be able to develop more. Our counter, obviously, is we want you to develop.

We're fine with you developing. but you don't have to develop dirty. You don't have to develop by putting more coal-fired power plants online. And that's what's been happening in the last few years. China regrettably has continued to build coal-fired power plants and to fund them in other countries around the world. To make the politics even more vexed, even more complicated, the U.S. has accused the Chinese government of genocide against the U.S.

on a very large scale. How can you accuse someone of genocide, however grounded in reality, without doubt, and yet at the same time get them to cooperate with you on a political, a technological, ecological, ecological problem of such huge scale and importance? Well, obviously difficult. It takes a discipline to do it, but both President Biden and President Xi agreed in their initial, conversations and in public statements that the climate crisis is so serious that they would separate it, that this would be a track on which hopefully we can compartmentalize and actually make progress. And historically, big nations with great power have been able to do that. Gorbachev and Reagan and Reykjavik decided we would stop pointing 50,000 warheads at each other

and move to reduce those numbers way down to about 1,500. It happened, despite the fact that Reagan believed the Soviet Union was the evil empire. So in terms of international affairs and diplomacy, we on my team are taking both leaders at face value that this is a separate issue. It doesn't mean that every arm of the government is going to stop saying something about Uyghurs or human rights, but it does mean that we have the ability to be able to separate things

and work where our common interests require us to work. How costly was the behavior of the Trump administration regarding climate? What did it cost us in terms of time? What did it cost us in terms of every time you walk into a negotiating room with foreign partners? The damage that President Trump

reeked worldwide, not limited to climate, but on climate, he did a whopper of a job of putting America's credibility in a terrible place, destroying it fundamentally. I hear from country after country, how do we know we can count on America? How do we know that, you know, another president is going to come along or someone like Trump who does the same thing again? And I mean, my answer is very simple that I don't believe any one politician can come along in the future and turn this tide because all around the planet, private sector is moving rapidly to do what governments aren't doing.

There's a major undertaking by banks, by asset managers, by corporations who are considering ESG in the boardrooms and who have made commitments to the sustainable development goals. there are trillions of dollars now moving to invest in alternative renewable energy, whether it's solar, hydro. There's just a phenomenal amount of economic activity being generated, and I don't think any politician would want to turn it around, frankly, in a few years, but also I don't think they could. Considering all the political context you've just provided, one of the difficulties here is it demands sacrifice of everyone to avert catastrophe. transitioning to renewables is going to cost trillions of dollars and upend huge industries. We're likely to have to eat less meat, use more public transportation. All of this is necessary.

To what degree are you and Joe Biden and your foreign counterparts really leveling with everybody, whether it's each other or with all of us, all the way down to the lowest level? David, I think we're being completely direct and totally transparent. and I don't agree with you that this is sacrifice. I don't agree with that. I do not believe people will have to necessarily eat differently. I mean, agriculture will change. There's a lot of research and work being done now

on diet of cattle, for instance. And there's a thing called aspergosis, I believe that's the right name, which is a seaweed that has been very apparently in its early trials, has reduced, if not eliminated, flatulence from cattle. And I'm confident that there will be huge research done that will change some of these things.

And all of the economic analyses show that there are millions of jobs to be created. The United States, we need to build a legitimate grid. We can go to the moon, we can direct a rover on Mars, we can invent vaccines, but we can't send a simple electron from California to New York. So in the building of that smart grid in America,

you will put electricians and plumbers and pipe fitters and steelworkers and heavy equipment operators and countless disciplines to work. And there's so many exciting parts of this. I mean, cars will be electric, not internal combustion engine. But you're still going to have workers, United Auto Workers, producing those cars. and I just think we're looking at a remarkable transformation.

This will be the biggest economic transformation since the Industrial Revolution, literally. Secretary Kerry, if I go to Fox News, I see a lot of these efforts mocked as they're going to come and take away your hamburgers. If I turn to the Senate, you looked at the first of the Biden administration's big infrastructure bills, and it was supposed to contain all sorts of climate measures.

And that got gutted, from the bill when Senate Republicans opposed it, how do you sell bold climate policy to Republicans? There are more and more Republicans, I think, David, who are really now beginning to take this more seriously and who are trying to figure out what actions they are prepared to support. And I understand, even in the House of Representatives, I think there has been some movement among some.

What I think is that Mother Nature is messaging pretty forcefully right now. Temperatures going up, the storms are getting more intense, the fires are bigger and more expansive and more frequent. So I think increasingly leaders are taking note of this and recognizing. For instance, President Putin was very clear. They have a real challenge in the northern part of Russia. In Siberia and the tundra, the permafrost and the tundra are thawing. They have cities there where they're becoming unstable. They're deeply concerned about the methane that is being released after 40,000 years of containment in the earth.

So Mother Nature is kind of screaming at people. Hey, guys, you know, you've got a problem. Mother Nature is screaming at them, but in Russia, for example, you have an economy that's based almost entirely or to a huge measure on an oil industry. Correct. They are an extractive economy, and we've talked very directly about that with Russia. But they have an ability now because they produce gas. Russia has an option of quickly closing coal plants that are more than 40 years old, inefficient, not working that effectively and not needed, in favor of transitioning to gas for the moment.

And I emphasize for the moment because gas is still a fossil fuel and gas is mostly methane. So it leaks and it also produces CO2. So it's not, in our judgment, anything near a long time. term solution unless somebody discovers 100% abatement. You're going from one meeting to the next, one country to the next, laying the groundwork for what we hope will be a successful climate negotiation in Glasgow come November. What would be the best possible outcome in Glasgow and what are the forces mitigating against it? The best outcome would be in Glasgow that the 20 major economies are all in agreement that they're going to make the best cuts they can, according to the

science, between 2020 and 2030. We want people to lay out plans for how they will get to net zero by 2050. And finally, I think the key will be to have cemented in through the final. structure, the $100 billion, the Green Climate Fund, that there will be money there to make this a just transition for people in parts of the world where they're taking the brunt of what is happening because of the developed world and they can't afford to make the transition themselves and do what they need to do to contribute. The frustration here, David, is that we can meet this challenge and we have the ability to be able to minimize the danger

and help countries to adapt and build resilience, but there's no debate anymore about science. Anybody who is reading, listening, learning knows this is actually happening now and it's human beings who are adding the greatest amount of fuel to the fire. Secretary Kerry, thank you so much. My pleasure. Thank you. John Kerry, former Secretary of State, is the special presidential envoy for climate. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The evangelical movement in this country, as it's something of a crossroads. For some years now, the number of Americans who identify as evangelical Christians has been dropping. And as politics shifted to the right, some in the movement grew alarmed. And they've started to break away from that orthodoxy. I found that me as a pastor's wife, that I withdrew by the time we got to our final church in the final years, I had become increasingly silent about things, that I no longer spoke up in Bible studies or small groups, because I felt like I just couldn't, I couldn't say what I really thought.

Beth Allison Barr is a religious scholar who challenged her church's gender politics, and she felt the consequences very personally. Barr spoke recently with staff writer Eliza Griswold, who's been covering the Evangelical Church. So one of the big riffs that we're seeing among American evangelicals comes down to gender, and gender roles both in the church, but also in the family and at home. The term that's used to describe these supposedly ancient biblical roles was coined in the 80s, and it's called complementarianism. At its most radical,

it's a code word for women submitting to their husbands and letting them make the decisions in every way. One of the key figures in this emerging debate about Christian patriarchy is a professor at Baylor University, which is a Christian college in Waco, Texas, and her name is Beth Allison Barr. Barr's book is called The Making of Biblical Womanhood.

And in it, she basically challenges the idea that these are traditional roles that women have played and instead traces the rise of biblical womanhood to a reaction against 1970s feminism. Modern evangelicals have a definition of womanhood, of what women are supposed to do. And they think it comes from the Bible. And my argument is that it does not come from the Bible, that it actually comes from culture. and that we can trace the history of how women's roles have changed over time and how the Bible has been molded to fit those different cultures and that what we think is biblical womanhood today isn't biblical, it's made in history. So now what I have found really interesting is how your life tracks pretty good.

directly with the evolution of these ideas in the 20th and into the 21st century. So could you tell us a little bit about your personal experience with them? So I grew up in a very small town in Texas. My parents were both Baptist, and so we went to the primary Baptist church in town, which was a Southern Baptist church. When I was young, when, you know, in the early 80s, was a time when James Dobson, focus on the family was really starting to take off and focus on the family was an initiative by James Dobson and some other Christian men who thought that the problem in American society

was the breakdown of the family. And so their goal was to restore God's order to the family, which is the proper authority of husband over wife, over children. And by doing this, this would fix the social problems of the world. So Focus on the Family had literature that became very popular in conservative churches. It also had a radio talk show. And in fact, that's where James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, really, I think, took off was with this radio show. And I remember when I was younger that my mother would listen to this radio. She often listened to it while she was doing household chores while she was sewing. And so these ideas that women are made to follow the leadership of men were part of my childhood. One of the things I found fascinating and learn from you

is that this tradition of complementarianism and this word that's so hallowed was actually coined in the late 80s. But the idea of complementarianism, like the conservative idea of women's mission is rooted, conservatives might argue, in the scripture itself, right? So what passages support these arguments? Right. So the passages that emphasize women not being in leadership roles are mostly the New Testament, mostly the Pauline letters. And in several of these letters that are written by Paul, as well as people who are associated with Paul, are what we call the household codes. One of the examples you look at in the book is this section from one of his letters to the Corinthians, the people in Corinth, 14. This is one of those famous women be silent passages.

And this is the text. Paul says, as in all the churches of the saints, women should be silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate as the law also says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home, for it is shameful for a woman to speak in church. And then there's this weird turn. And Paul says, did the word of God originate with you? Or are you the only ones it has reached? And it sounds like he's arguing with all he's just said. Like he's arguing with that very stricture that tells women to be silent. And when you lay that out in your book and apply the historical method to this passage, there's evidence to interpret Paul extremely differently. So as a historian, looking at these tags,

I know that they are not written within a vacuum. They're not written to a 21st century audience. They're written to a first century audience. And so it's not surprising that the strategies that the authors of these texts use are strategies that are from their time period. So Paul's a first century educated Roman. And he is using the rhetorical strategies of his time to make his arguments, his persuasive arguments within his letters.

And one of the strategies that he uses over and over again, is when he cites what is wrong, and then he refutes it. And that's the Corinthian perspective. Women should be silent in church and only ask their husbands at home. And then he turns it on its head. He refutes it in this accepted rhetorical strategy. He says, what? Did the word of God originate with you?

The problem, however, is that in the late 19th and early 20th century, their scholars begin to argue that you had to read the Bible at face value, that if the Bible was true, it had to be completely true, historically, scientifically, theoretically, et cetera, and didn't have to be placed within its context to be understood. And so an example of this is a scholar named B.B. Warfield, who was at Princeton Theological Seminary, and he argued in the early 20th century that we may not like what Paul says, but Paul said for women to be silent, and essentially that's that. And this has become the predominant understanding among conservative evangelicals in the 20th century. So some of the pushback

against your book has been that it's really impossible to, let's say, whitewash what Paul is saying, or to make it sound like he's not saying women be silent in church, if that's what it says in black and white. And the deeper question there is, can you really read patriarchy out of the Bible? So the answer to that is, no, you can't read patriarchy out of the Bible. But I think we can separate what the intentions are versus, you know, the historical reality of what humans do. I mean, I think this quest to be in power over other people is something that humans have been doing from the very beginning. And we see that in the Bible. We see the power struggles. And so patriarchy is a part of the Bible because patriarchy is a part of history. But I do believe that the God we serve is not a proponent,

a patriarchy. And I think all you have to do is look at Jesus and what Jesus does for women in the New Testament and realize that he is approaching women very differently from the rest of the world. Now, the success of your book has been stunning, right? I mean, you're in your fourth printing. The book hit number 26 on Amazon. So now you are speaking to us from Waco, Texas. I am. And what has been the response to it from in your local community? And also, what have you been hearing from your readers? So in my local community, I have heard mixed responses to the first. book. So a lot of the pastors are reading my book and some, which I'm very thankful for, but many of them are troubled by the ideas that I put in it. And some of them are starting to post those ideas to their congregation, sort of as a, I don't know if it's a warning, but letting them know that they disagree with, they disagree with me. On the other hand, though, the women

who go to these churches and even their husbands and their families are reaching out to me daily. Some of the people who have reached out to me that aren't local are pastor's wives. Their stories are so similar to my story, that their husbands were fired in brutal ways, like my husband was, when they tried to stand up for women or put women into teaching positions, and they lost everything. So you too are a pastor's wife. So can you tell us a little bit about what, how did complementarianism, how did these ideas factor into your life as a pastor's wife? Yes. During my marriage, I have been in four different churches as a pastor's wife. And I found that me as a pastor's wife that I withdrew by the time we got to our final church in the same,

the final years, I had become increasingly silent about things that I no longer spoke up in Bible studies or small groups because I felt like I just couldn't, I couldn't say what I really thought. It came to a head in 2016. 2016 was just a hard year for us. And it, we, there had been some things going on in the church. The gender hierarchy had been hardening over time. So we had begun to notice this and as our ideas both had been evolving on this issue, we began to be more and more bothered by it. We also began to be bothered by it because we knew the impact that it had on the teenagers. And that was really disconcerting for us to know that we had teenage boys who thought that there was something about their bodies that made them be able to have spiritual

authority over the girls in the room. I mean, that just is such a dangerous idea. So those things were upsetting us. And then there was also a very practical thing is we couldn't find a leader for the high school Sunday school class. Finally, this one guy said, I'll do it if I can co-lead. So I don't have to do it every Sunday. And so he asked a friend who wanted to do it, who was a woman. And so my husband and I were like, okay. And so we took that to the elders.

We weren't allowed to present it in person. We had to write it and submit it to them for them to talk about it. And then they called us back and said, no, that we are not going to allow this. And that was the moment that my husband and I had to make a decision. You know, could we continue to stay in this church environment and keep our mouths shut, or were we going to try to change what was going on in our church? And obviously, we chose to try and change it. And but I remember my husband, we were in the garage and he looked at me and he said, if I do this,

I will lose my job. But I actually didn't believe him because I thought, these are friends. These are the people that we've lived with, you know, for 14 years. They know us. Surely they won't let us get fired over us simply trying to get a woman to teach a Sunday school class. and three weeks later my husband was fired. Such a story. And one morning when I came to church, they had set up a table to tell us goodbye, essentially,

and it had a picture of my family on it, and it had some little cards. And it hit me very badly when I saw it, because I saw the pretending about how what had happened to us was a good thing. and I just, I lost it. I just walked out, left, I went home, and I immediately pulled out my computer and I started writing a blog post. So it was sort of my manifesto to myself and my manifesto that I was not going to lose my faith over this.

And I started a series on rethinking Romans. And it led to a second series called Disrupting Christian Patriarchy. and it was that disrupting Christian patriarchy series that got the attention of an editor. And you chose to stay within Christian publishing. Why was that? Yeah. So the editor that approached me represented a Christian press. And I remember thinking, because I had some good friends who were also Christians and were doing trade press publishing and had gone with trade press with non-Christian publishers. And their audience was bigger. and it had broader appeal.

And one of my friends that I was talking to, she said, you know, Beth, who are you talking to? Who is your audience? And I was like, it's Christian women. And one of the things is that Christian women read books. The Christian marketing system is just amazingly strong. The small group system where people do book studies together and all buy the same book and read them in their houses together. I mean, this is an incredibly strong part of it. evangelical culture. So, Beth, what would a feminist movement within evangelical Christianity

look like? How does it work? If biblical womanhood can be made, how is it unmade? Yeah. So churches have always been supported primarily by women, even though churches mostly have had male leadership. And so the fact is, is that churches cannot function without the women who form a large part of their volunteer workforce. All it takes is a few women in some of these churches to start some of these reading groups and then start asking questions. Like, well, why can't I talk, why can't I pray on stage? Why can't I be a deacon? Phoebe was a deacon. Why, you know, deacons were in the early church? Why can't deacons be in our church? That's historian Beth Allison Barr. Her book is called The Making of Biblical Womanhood, How the Subjugation of Women

became gospel truth. She spoke with the New Yorker's Eliza Griswold. Now just one note, Barr's former church disputes her account and denies that her husband was fired because he tried to hire a woman as a co-teacher. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program. I want to thank you for joining us. See you soon. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Cario, Riannon Corby, Calalia, David Krasnow, Gophane and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, Annabelle, and Stephen Valentino.

And we had additional help from Harrison Keithline. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.