John Kerry on the urgency of global climate action

Dame Amelia Fawcett

Secretary Kerry, London’s Mayor, Sadiq Khan, ladies and gentlemen, welcome, and a particularly warm welcome to Secretary Kerry, a man whose extraordinary life of public service and impactful work in so many areas, not least climate change, I’ve long admired. It’s a great honour to have you here at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, possibly the most diverse place on Earth. Home to globally unrivalled collections of plants and fungi. All around us are almost 900 endangered species in these gardens. There are more than 8½ million specimens in the science collections, some of which we saw a minute ago, used daily by Kew Scientists and others for critical research into plant science. From identifying threatened species and areas for conservation, to researching properties of plants and fungi. This is exciting, game changing work.

For example, in Ethiopia, one of the world’s main producers of coffee, millions of smallholders rely on coffee income, but production’s been severely affected by climate change. Kew Scientists have mapped the future impact of temperature in Ethiopia, studied species of wild coffee, which have adapted to local conditions, and suggested areas for future production of wild coffee species. That coffee’s now being grown today and is available worldwide.

We also have two billion seeds in the vaults of the Millennium Seed Bank at Wakehurst in Sussex, where we and our global partners collect wild plant seeds as a safety net against their extinction, and we study the traits they’ve developed in response to phenomena like climate change, pests and diseases. During the recent Australian bushfires, we worked to support our longstanding Australian partners with emergency seed collection in the affected areas and we repatriated seeds held in the Millennium Seed Bank for propagation and the restoration of local Australian habitats. We believe global problems need global solutions, so Kew Scientists work with over 400 partners in 100 countries.

We’re often asked, “Why is all of this so important?” The simple, but compelling, answer is because all life on Earth depends on plants and fungi, as food, fuel, medicines, fibres. Plants and fungi also provide critical ecosystem services, such as carbon sequestration, water filtration, oxygen production and so much more. They hold solutions to many of the challenges that we face today. In that spirit, we strongly support the US administration’s commitment to nature-based solutions, and we share the belief that achieving net-zero by 2050 just won’t be possible without nature. Nature offers a valuable and untapped resource, but at the current rates of biodiversity loss, we risk losing nature’s secrets before they can be unlocked, and with that, we also lose forever ways of mitigating and adapting to climate change.

The need for action has never been greater. As Dav – Sir David Attenborough said, “What we do now and in the next few years will profoundly affect the next few thousand years.” What’s agreed and the commitments made at the upcoming UN Conferences on Climate Change and Biodiversity will affect the trajectory of both the climate and biodiversity crises. For our part, Kew commits to do all we can to deepen and share our knowledge relating to these dual crises.

So, before turning the proceedings over to Secretary Kerry, it’s my pleasure to welcome Dr Robin Niblett, Director and Chief Executive Officer of Chatham House, who’ll say a few words. Robin [applause].

Dr Robin Niblett CMG

Thank you very much, Dame Amelia. Thanks so much for this partnership today, which is so well timed and so important. We’re delighted to be co-hosting this event with Secretary Kerry, with you, the Royal Botanical Gardens here in Kew, a 250-year-old institution, that as you said, is really fighting for a healthy ecosystem, which is now additionally so critical for the health of this planet, given the impacts of climate change and the way, as you said, that a healthy ecosystem can really help address the climate challenge.

I want to thank the US State Department and the US Embassy very much for their partnership in putting on this event. It’s a shame we can’t have Yael Lempert with us here, but her and her team have been a fantastic support. I want to thank my colleague, Leslie Vinjamuri, the Director of our US/Americas Programme, Dean of our Queen Elizabeth Academy, her team for helping pull this together, and Kamil Hussain and the tech folks, who are behind making sure that we can have an effective event in this wonderful venue.

Chatham House, like our – like the Royal Botanical Gardens, has put climate change at the heart of our research since the mid-1980s. We’ve never really thought of energy without thinking about its impact on the planet. Tim Benton, who’s with us today, leads our Energy and Envir – our Environment and Society Programme, new name for it, Environment and Society Programme, and fantastic to have him here with us today and some of his colleagues. Also, Bernice Lee, who founded our Sustainability Accelerator, now led by Ana Yang. All of them are working together to try to design innovative pathways to a really sustainable planet in the future and all that enterms – all that entails in terms of our climate goals.

The sense of urgency, obviously, is palpable. We are holding this event today in the Nash Conservatory. It, of course, feels a little bit like the Nash greenhouse at the moment and that might be an appropriate term at the moment, given the incredible impacts that we’re seeing on our planet at the moment. The disastrous effects of climate change have been visible around the world in the last days and weeks. And it’s for this reason that we are, I think can speak, certainly on behalf of my Chatham House colleagues, delighted to see a US administration that is putting climate so fervently at the heart of its international agenda.

Under President Biden, the US has recommitted to the Paris Agreement. It has really set forward some ambitious goals, doubled its commitment from before, now pledging to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 50% from 2005 levels, by 2030, really setting a very important example for the future, which is important, given that the US is the second largest emitter of global greenhouse gases, right now, in the world, and one of the largest per capita in the G20. So, as Secretary Kerry heads to the G20 Administerial Meeting in Naples, in the next couple of days, American leadership is going to be absolutely critical and from my opinion, the fact that President Biden has selected Secretary Kerry to lead this process, to be the first US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, is emblematic of this absolutely ferocious commitment of the govern – of the Biden administration.

As you all know, Secretary Kerry was Secretary of State from 2013 to 17. He’d served in the US Senate from 85 to 2013. He was the Democratic nominee for the US Presidency back in 2004, and I would add that he was a winner of the Chatham House Prize in 2016 for his very important work for diplomacy on striking the nuclear deal with Iran. And we know from that, as I think everyone here knows, he is a ferocious worker towards his goals. He’s somebody who has command of the detail, he’s a powerful communicator to the public and he is incredibly persuasive master of the diplomatic brief. And I think with those skills, Secretary Kerry, we know you’re going to really make a personal difference to this most important of the world’s challenges today, and we’re thrilled to be able to co-host to you with the Royal Botanical Gardens today. Look forward to your remarks. We will take some questions after them. Over to you [applause].

John Kerry

Thank you, Robin, for a remarkably generous introduction. Ladies and gentlemen, I accept the nomination. I really appreciate Robin being here and I’m a great admirer of the incredible work of Chatham House, so thank you very, very much for being part of this and Dame Amelia Fawcett, thank you, a fellow Bostonian. But thank you very much for a warm welcome. From your world renowned seed banking programme, to the modelling work that you do, I just met with one of your Scientists, Kew is making measurable contributions to the challenge of climate and biodiversity and we thank you very, very much for those efforts.

I want to promise you, ladies and gentlemen, though we came here to talk about the greenhouse effect, we did not intend to put you in a greenhouse, and feel free – I think I may take this off momentarily, but I appreciate it. Let me introduce two guests, and very important. I’m very grateful to Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, who is one of the leaders in the C40 with Mayors across the world. Thank you, Mr Mayor, for being here today [applause]. And an old friend from his days as Environment Minister, when I was Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and Secretary of State, and Ed Miliband is here and we appreciate it, as a Shadow Minister [applause], the Shadow Government representative today [applause].

So, obviously, we’re meeting at a very difficult time in the pandemic and the COVID crisis still holds too many people at risk of severe illness, hospitalisation and death. And while the extraordinary technological development of vaccines is helping to ease the crisis, we are, obviously, not yet through it. I am very sorry to say the suffering of COVID will be magnified many times over in a world that does not grapple with, and ultimately halts, the climate crisis.

We don’t have the luxury of waiting until COVID is vanquished to take up the climate challenge. So, it’s good to be back in the UK, where my friend, Alok Sharma, and his team, are hard at work preparing to host the UN Climate Conference COP26 in Glasgow this November. And I am particularly grateful to join you in this remarkable setting. It’s an amazing place, which is both a living tribute to nature’s beauty, but also its fragility. And fundamentally, the struggle to tackle the global climate crisis is just as simple and profound as this place. It’s about protecting and preserving the fragile world that we share. It’s about understanding that it costs more not to respond to the climate crisis than it does to respond, and it is, without exaggeration, about survival.

But within the question of how we meet our collective responsibility is a political question, not about partisanship or ideology, but about the simple capacity of our institutions to come together and to do big transformative things, and that is also something about which the legacy of London can tell us a great deal. I spent enough time in Europe as a young person that I learned not to take stability on the continent for granted.

My grandfather was an American Businessman who raised his family between the US, the UK and France. As the storm clouds of World War Two gathered, my mother and members of her family fled France, as an occupying army moved through the country. Their house was ultimately bombed and burned to the ground. And when I was just four-years-old, my mother brought me there to visit the ruins, her first visit back since the war. Almost nothing was left, and the skeleton of a burned-out building rose into the sky with one stone staircase. That is my earliest memory. And I mention it because I am glad to have it, because like most in my generation, I grew up with a visceral understanding of how close the world came to chaos and how allies and alliances dedicated to order and openness, common interests and shared values, made all the difference, not just to avert another conflict, but to heal and rebuild a shattered world.

The world order that exists today did not just emerge on a whim. It was built by leaders and nations determined to make sure that never again would we come so close to the edge of abyss, and that journey has always given me a bedrock confidence that together, we actually can solve humanity’s biggest threats. The climate crisis, my friends, is the test of our times and while some may still believe it is unfolding in slow motion, no, this test is now as acute and as existential as any previous one.

The irony should not be lost on us that it is young people around the world who are calling on adults to behave like adults and exercise their basic responsibilities. Young people, who feel forced to put down their schoolbooks, march out of the classroom to strike for climate. They know the world is not responding fast enough to an existential threat that they didn’t create, but for which they risk bearing the ultimate burden, uninhabitable communities on an increasingly unliveable planet, in their lifetimes. How must the global political system look through their eyes? All the talk about values and architecture means little to a generation that has grown up every single day under the mounting danger and now, the undeniable reality of a climate crisis to which the politics almost everywhere has failed to respond adequately for more than 30 years.

I’ve been part of that journey. I was there in 1988 when Jim Hansen testified that it was happening. I was in Rio in 1992 when we had the first Earth Summit. That was number one, now we’re at number 26. It’s no wonder their generation doesn’t share in the confidence that the world can, and will, move forward. The world can and will make a difference. It’s no wonder that those young people are wondering where we are. The world can, and will, rise to this occasion, despite the fact that it hasn’t yet. At least that possibility is still there. Nostalgia, for what our parents’ generation accomplished, is absolutely no antidite – dote to the anxiety of these young folks and even their anger at what our generation has so far failed to do.

We adults, who have votes and legislatures, or elections and multilateral institutions, seats in the Situation Room at the White House and the boardrooms, we must provide answers that are tangible, not theoretical, and above all, we need to provide action and we need to do it now, because time is running out. Not a euphemism, not an exaggeration, time is running out.

Six years ago, the Paris Agreement brought countries together. I had the privilege of leading our Negotiating Team. The goal was of limiting the total increase of the Earth’s temperature to “well below 2° Celsius and to pursue efforts towards 1.5.” Under the Agreement, each country committed to do what it determined by itself it was willing to do, collectively, to put the world on the right path. Yes, the agreement was a historic show of unity in the face of global threat, and it is making a difference today.

Countries have put forward initial targets that would reduce warming by about a full degree Celsius. Just achieving that was crucial progress, pulling us back from the brink of an inconceivably dangerous future. But what we have to also be honest about now is the limits of what we engineered together, because the fundamental truth of the Paris Agreement is that even if every country fulfilled its initial promises, and many are falling short, even if everyone did what they said they would do in Paris, the temperature of this planet will still rise by upwards of 2.5 or 3° Centigrade.

We’re already seeing dramatic consequences, with 1.2°. Imagining the doubling. To contemplate doubling that is to invite catastrophe. I’m not an exaggerator, I’m not an alarmist, but I do believe in science. Two and two is four, it’s still four, despite the fact that some Politicians want you to debate whether or not it’s five and chew up all our time and energy.

Since the year since Paris, the scientific community has now determined that even the agreements well below 2° is not enough to stave off climate chaos. A seminal 2018 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, made clear that we must focus on capping warming as close as we can get to 1.5°, if not 1.5. Much more warming than that and life on our planet will become increasingly unrecognisable. And that prospect of an unliveable tomorrow should be, I would think, as alarming as it is sobering, as we take stock of the world we are living in today.

Already today we share a world in which more frequent and powerful hurricanes and typhoons destroy homes, businesses and communities. Just last week, a rainfall of such intensity that it flooded communities in Germany, Holland and Belgium, leaving hundreds of dead and thousands facing years of difficult recovery. Nigeria and Uganda also experienced massive destructive flooding in recent weeks. Today, we share a world in which fiery conflagrations rampage across Australia and the American West and even the Russian tundra. Even the rainforests of the Amazon are burning. We share a world in which record heatwaves force cities to install relief centres, cause roads to buckle and illnesses to spike, resulting in thousands of heat related deaths a year, where extremes are everyday fare, like Siberia, reaching a scorching 118° inside the Arctic Circle, or Antarctica at 70° Fahrenheit last February.

We’re living in a world where crops no longer grow where they always did before, the chemistry of the oceans changes more and faster than ever before, where millions of people are forced to leave increasingly uninhabitable homelands, maybe 20 million a year migrating around the world. We all know what the political impact of migration was a few years ago and still, imagine what happens when places become uninhabitable, and people are knocking on the door of the places where they know people can live. These impacts are real and most of them, my friends, are irreversible. That’s what the Scientists told me, ‘irreversible’.

But even more horrifying is what the world would look like in the near future, unless we change course. The world of 2100, the world of our children and grandchildren, just 80 years from now, a world where major cities: Jakarta, Mumbai, Shanghai, Venice, Bangkok, New Orleans, and many more, will need trillions of dollars in infrastructure just to survive repeated flooding and high tides. A world in which the ocean is more acidic and starved for oxygen, despite the fact that we, we humans, breathe 51% of our oxygen coming from the ocean, an ocean that is increasingly hostile for marine life, devoid of most tropical coral reefs, and with that, the loss of protection from storms and food security for millions. A world in which the Arctic may not have any ice in the summer. A world in which over one third of the population will face longer lasting heatwaves, with unprecedented regularity. A world in which farmers and construction workers cannot work outside without risking heatstroke. Where a month’s worth of rain falling in an hour may become commonplace, where droughts last months longer and occur more frequently and hundreds and millions of people suffer from freshwater scarcity.

Just look at the Himalayas melting, the other Alp – the Malps, other mountains, the feeders or the great rivers of our world, the Yangtze, the Yellow River, the Mekong, the Ganges, billions of people living along those riverbanks. A world in which crops, families have grown for generations are no longer viable, where conditions for malaria transmission and other chronic illnesses skyrocket and pandemics, like the one we continue to battle today, actually become more prevalent.

So, what do all these statistics add up to? Would be a world in chaos. It’s a world where whole countries would be destabilised from stalled economical growth, hunger, starvation, escalating conflict over resources and people would be forced to abandon their homes. Just look at the people in Germany needing billions of bailout. We bailed out three storms a few years ago, $265 billion, but we couldn’t even find $100 billion to fulfil our obligation to the Paris Agreement. So, we’re looking at a world in which we ultimately spend so much money, the potential of the world and effort, just coping with disasters, that we can’t invest in tomorrow. It undermines everything that we have been fighting for and no country, rich or poor, will be spared.

So, one thing is certain, everything I’ve just said is not the description of a world of science fiction. It’s what Scientists tell us will be reality by the end of the century if our emissions of greenhouse gases pollution do not decline. And we are forewarned; everything the Scientists have been telling us now will happen for 30 years is happening, but bigger and faster than was predicted, and you don’t need to be a Scientist to know that what we’re looking at is a world no parent would ever be content to leave behind as an inheritance for future generations.

Facts, evidence and science all make clear that we have a narrow window to avoid that future. We can still avoid it, but we have to begin to act with genuine urgency, bringing countries all across this planet together. Simply put, the world needs to cut emissions, greenhouse gas CO₂ emissions, particularly, by at least 45% by 2030, in order to be on a credible scientific path by mid-century to net-zero. That’s what the IPCC showed us, 45%, not just in some countries or some regions, but the world over. And they found that 45% is the minimum that the world must reduce. That makes this the decisive decade, and it makes 2021 a decisive year, and most of all, it must make COP26 in Glasgow this year a pivotal moment for the world to come together to meet and master the climate challenge.

This week marks 100 days until Glasgow, six months into my time as President Biden’s Special Presidential Envoy for Climate and six months since President Biden re-joined the Paris Agreement and committed his administration to bold climate action. After our absence for four years, my friends, we approach this challenge with humility, but let me be clear, we approach it with ambition. We know that we cannot redeem the past or retrieve four lost years, which in Churchill’s phrase, could be described as “years the locusts have eaten.” But now a new American President is boldly moving to make up for lost time, and this is an important demarcation moment, to assess where we all stand with the time that we have left to get the job done.

To meet the challenge at the Leaders’ Summit in April, the United States announced an ambitious target of reducing our emissions over the next ten years, by 2030, we will reduce by 50 to 52%, and President Biden announced bold policies to back that up. It’s not rhetoric, it’s real. Pick up the paper today and you’ll read about the fight that’s going on for infrastructure and for the future. He’s planning to put 500,000 electric vehicle stations deployed by 2030 around our country. He’s set a carbon-free power sector goal by 2035, investing $35 billion in clean energy research, development and a demonstration and achieving net-zero emissions no later than 2050, if not sooner. We are moving to reach these goals with legislative and regulatory action, including working with Congress to achieve unprecedented resources for climate focused assistance, for developing countries. We do all this knowing full well no country and no continent alone can solve the climate crisis. So, we are working with allies, partners, competitors and even adversaries, all too aware that some things happen today, threaten to erase the very progress that so many are struggling to advance.

How alarming is it, my friends, that as we race to Glasgow, some countries are currently still building new carbon polluting coal plants and even planning to break ground on more in the future? At a time when many countries are committed to plant more trees as a nature-based solution, other countries are actually clearcutting more trees and continuing to illegally, illegally cut down the rainforests. They are removing the lungs of the world, destroying irreplaceable biodiversity, of all the places in the world, that’s understood here, and destabilising the climate, and they’re doing that all at the same time.

How irrational is it that there are countries actually turning – burning more coal and using less solar than they were a decade ago, even as the costs of clean energy have plummeted well below fossil fuel? To paraphrase Einstein, “Insanity is continuing to do something that will kill you even when you know it will.” We can’t afford a world so divided in its response to the climate crisis when the evidence for – is so compelling for action. We have to make choices together. Life is about choices, you all know that, everybody does. So is governing, so is leading, so this moment requires.

In World War Two and its aftermath, leaders did what they had to do to get the job done. After the United States finally joined the war, Churchill didn’t lament in his nightly journal how reluctant that we had been or how long it had taken us. He wrote simply these words, “Today we have won.” Roosevelt, like Churchill, had a deep antipathy toward the Soviet system and it wasn’t hard to imagine looming possibility of a cold war that would define the second half of the 20th Century. But they didn’t hesitate to form an alliance with the Soviets, because there was no other way to prevail in the struggle. They both correctly identified at the time as existential.

Overnight, at home and around the world, distilleries were converted into producing fuel for jet planes and tanks. A Ford Motor Company, a plant in Michigan, turned out one B-24 bomber every hour. We retooled our economy, we responded to a threat that policymakers didn’t just call existential, but acted like it really was. How many people have you heard say, “Oh, climate change, existential crisis” and how many places are responding as if it is?

After the war, with refugees at record numbers, with a continent gripped by hunger and devastation, its critical infrastructure wiped out, the world acted once again as if the threat was existential and instead of pulling each other apart, we pulled together with the Marshall Plan and the rebuilding of the order that has served us well since then. And that is precisely what we must do now, treat climate crisis as the crisis it has become and mount a response that is comparable to wartime mobilisation, a massive opportunity to rebuild our economies after COVID-19, to ‘Build Better’. How many times have you heard that phrase after this pandemic? That’s the mission everywhere that we are engaged in for these last six months and I promise you in these next 100 days.

Let me be clear, we are [pause] – I want to be very clear about this, ‘cause there are countries that express concern about what they’re asked to do. And the fact is that we are not saying that every country must, will or can, do the same thing; they can’t. But we are saying that every country can do enough and can do what is appropriate within its ability to help us keep on track to win this battle, not because it’s one region or one country against another or competition, because we are literally all in this together, and the biggest step of this decade is scaling up the development of a global clean energy economy.

Energy accounts for three quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions, how we power our homes, how we power our cars and so forth, and by 2030, we have to speed up the deployment of the clean technologies that we already have. Put them on super steroids and deploy, deploy, deploy. According to the International Energy Agency, that means the equivalent of building the world’s biggest solar plant every day for the next decade, ramping up renewable energy from wind and solar by four times what it is today, to reach 1,000 gigawatts installed per year in 2030. It means ensuring that in 2030, 60% of new car sales around the world are electric vehicles and all of this will fuel clean energy investment boom globally, reaching $4 trillion a year by 2030. That is the task ahead of us.

Second, we must also need to develop and demonstrate and scale up emerging technologies during this decade, so that they can play a major role in decarbonising the global economy by 2050. Between now and 2030, the IEA says that “Governments are going to need to invest $90 billion in technology demonstration projects.” We’ll need to rapidly scale up green hydrogen and clean fuels that could slash emissions from heavy industries, cement, concrete, aluminium, steel. We’ll also need to develop the equivalent of installing the largest carbon capture storage facility currently in operation, but we have to do that every nine days, through 2030. A raft of other technologies, spanning advanced renewables and nuclear, long duration energy storage, smart grids, battery storage, direct air carbon capture, so many different things that could provide the saving grace, but they all need to be commercialised and scaled, and this is even more of a challenge.

And third, if we invest heavily in clean energy and in energy efficiency that curbs rising global demand for energy and then, of course, fossil fuels, the demand will naturally drop. Starting now, the IEA tells us that we do not actually need a new investment in oil, coal or gas production, because they’re simply not necessary to meet our energy needs, given other technologies that are online and coming online.

By 2040 we should have entirely phased out all unabated coal and unabated oil plants and sharply reduced reliance on unabated natural gas generation, and the good news, my friends, is that the proof is all around us that we can do this. Clean energy technologies are already cheaper than fossil fuels and we have a playbook to do the same thing across many other emerging clean technologies.

Over the last decade, the cost of solar power plummeted 90%, the cost of onshore wind plunged 70% and today, solar and wind power are the cheapest source of new electricity generation in countries accounting for 77% of global GDP. Last year, China and the United States, the world’s two largest emitters, installed record amounts of renewable energy, despite the pandemic, and 90% of the new electricity in the world came from renewable sources, so, we know we can do it.

Renewable energy technologies fell in cost as governments and private companies invested in research, development and demonstration, and the US Department of Energy launched the SunShot Program in 2011 to drive down the cost of solar power by 75% in a decade. And thanks to advances in our country and around the world, solar hit that target three years early.

Learning from this experience, the Biden administration is launching a series of Earth Shots to drive down the costs of new technologies, marshalling the innovative capacity of Researchers and companies, and if we meet these Earth Shots by 2030, we will turbocharge the clean energy revolution. Already, inspiring innovations are emerging from research laboratories and garnering private investment to enter commercial markets. Breakthroughs in solid state batteries could enable electric vehicles’ driving range to actually be longer than traditional gasoline cars, with lightning quick recharging times. The next generation of solar cells can produce more power from the sun at a fraction of the cost of today’s already inexpensive technology. We’re on the march, we’re headed in the right direction. We just don’t know when we’re going to get where we need to.

Reaching global net-zero emissions represents the greatest market transformation, with the greatest economic promise since the Industrial Revolution. But the energy sector isn’t the only driver of global emissions. Other areas are critical as well, such as halting illegal deforestation to manage emissions from land use. More and more countries are emboldening their commitments to climate action and they’re reaping the benefits for their people and their economies.

At the summit in April, in Washington, but globally virtually, Canada raised its 2030 target from 30% to fully 40 to 45%. It is now working on its own roadmap for implementation. Japan stepped up to pledge a reduction in its emissions by 46 to 50%. These powerful announcements built on the impressive pledges from the European Union to slash emissions by 55% by 2030 and the United Kingdom to cut its emissions by 68% in timeframe.

Here in the UK, you have demonstrated how to align economic value with climate action, with a Ten Point
Green Industrial Plan for the future, from offshore wind, to clean hydrogen, to jet fuel and more. And countries like Germany have also made important contributions to bend the global cost curve of solar power and deploy renewables on a large scale.

And what does all that add up to? Before and during the April summit, countries representing 55% of global GDP announced 2030 commitments consistent with the global pace required to keep 1.5° within reach, and momentum continues to build worldwide as we meet with various countries. South Korea and South Africa are both on track to strengthen their own climate targets ahead of Glasgow. Some of the world’s leading producers of oil and gas are already showing signs they’re ready to move too. Russia just agreed with us on the importance of robust implementation of Paris’s temperature goals and the global pursuit of net-zero emissions, which they’ve never embraced yet.

After my visit to Moscow last week, we announced a joint commitment to make “significant efforts in this decade to limit global warming.” Saudi Arabia, likewise, joined us in affirming the importance “the importance of reducing emissions and taking adaptation actions during the 2020s to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.” And in the landmark regional dialogue of ten Middle East and North African countries in the United Arab Emirates, including multiple oil producers, countries unanimously agreed to reducing emissions by 2030.

Now, yes, these are only words and we’re cleareyed about that, but they are the start. They are encouraging words and in the next 100 days, we can build on that. The conversation is shifting from half measures to what it actually takes to get the job done. For example, major players are mobilising to “tap the brakes to cutting methane,” a short-lived, but potent, greenhouse gas that many times more destructive than carbon dioxide.

But here is the challenge. Despite 55% of the world climbing onboard for a 1.5° future, including many of the countries I just mentioned, despite that, there is still so much more that needs to be done. Mother Nature does not pick and choose which country’s emissions are warming the planet. Before she engulfs us in droughts, or fires, or floods, Mother Nature doesn’t differentiate between greenhouse gases from Europe, or from the US, or from China. Mother Nature only feels the impact and tracks emissions into the atmosphere, writ large, and what matters to our collective fate is the total of all those gases and the emissions track we are on together. That brings us inexorably to the world’s relationship with China.

To those who say, “We should avoid engaging with China on climate change because of our differences,” I say there is simply no way, mathematical or ideological, to solve the climate crisis without the full co-operation and leadership of a country that today leads the world with 28% of global emissions. The International Energy Agency has laid out the reductions that are needed at a global scale and their statistics imply that if China sticks with its current plan and does not peak its emissions until 2030, then the entire rest of the world would have to go to zero, zero, by 2040 or even 2035. It knocks at least a decade off the timeline for the rest of the world to decarbonise and that, my friends, sets a goal that currently is impossible to achieve.

So, it is imperative that we, the United States, the second biggest emitter, and China, and the rest of the world, are all pulling together in the same direction in this critical effort. In a remarkably short time, China has produced unprecedented economic growth, but a foundational building block of that growth has been a staggering amount of fossil fuel use and as a large country, an economic leader, and now the largest driver of climate change, China absolutely can help lead the world to success by peaking and starting to reduce emissions early during this critical decade of 2020 to 2030. And I say that simply because it is factual scientifically.

The truth is, there’s no alternative, because without sufficient reduction by China, together with the rest of us, the goal of 1.5° is essentially impossible. China’s partnership and leadership on this issue of extraordinary international consequence is essential, and even as China continues to build and fund coal-fire power plants at a troubling pace, it is important to note that China has generally exceeded its international climate commitments in what it does at home. As it builds out the details of their 14th five-year plan, experts all around the world are convinced that they could find greater opportunities to accelerate reductions in emissions, without losing or slowing down their economy and without being asked to do something that’s unfair.

I am convinced they can overperform with higher commitments to renewable energy, to displace a great deal of coal. More attention could be paid to methane emissions, a faster transition to electric vehicles, stronger building codes, industrial processes, offer huge possibilities to show leadership in building clean energy economies. President Xi announced to the UN last year that China would, “scale up its NDC” and we hope that will include spec – sector specific near-term actions in their 14th five-year plan, enabling earlier peaking and the possibility of rapid reductions afterwards.

Now, obviously, it is not a mystery that China and the US have many differences, but on climate co-operation, it is the only way to break free from the world’s current mutual suicide pact. President Biden and President Xi have both stated, unequivocally, that each will co-operate on climate despite other consequential differences. America needs China to succeed in slashing emissions and China needs America to do its part and do the same. The best opportunity that we have to secure a reasonable climate future is for China and the United States to work together and the best way to do so is to lay out specific ambitious near-term reduction goals and back them up with serious policy and work together to set an example to the world of where we need to go and how we can get there.

India, the world’s third largest emitting nation, has set an impressive target of building 450 gigawatts of renewable energy by 2030 and that target is really critical to the world’s quest to hold 1.5°, because without a rapid clean energy transition, India’s emissions will surpass the United States by 2040. And that’s why, in a meeting with Prime Minister Modi, we were able to agree on a new partnership with India, the US-India Agenda 2030 Partnership, which President Biden and Prime Minister Modi launched at the summit, and it will take specific actions to deploy that renewable energy. We’re working to mobilise billions of new cash, fresh investment of India’s burgeoning clean energy.

Still, some people argue that India did not create today’s predicament and therefore, why should it have to share in the solution? Well, I just explain that the process doesn’t allow for individualisation of where the emissions come from. But more importantly, the solutions to climate change are the greatest economic opportunity we’ve seen on this planet since the Industrial Revolution, and the fact is the consequences of climate crisis will not be reserved for those countries most responsible for the problem. That’s just a reality.

So, we simply cannot keep 1.5° within reach without every one of the world’s major economies acting, without bringing the remaining 45% onboard into the task. We also need to heed the needs and the aspirations of all those who are particularly vulnerable nations. This process must be fair, and it cannot be just the developed world that has the ability to respond. The fact is that 20 economies equal about 75 to 80% of all the emissions. So, some countries are right when they point the finger and say, “Wait a minute, we’re suffering the impacts, but we didn’t create this.” It’s a fundamental matter of equity and fairness that we respond to those for whom the climate crisis is imminently existential and to that end, President Biden has pledged to triple our support for adaptation efforts by 2024 and we’re working with our partners to further strengthen our collective support for the Paris Finance Agreements and commitments by time we reach Glasgow.

To the world’s emerging economies, for whom development is justly your foremost priority, let me just say we will help you chart your own pathways to prosperity, pathways not on the polluting practices of the past, but on the clean sustainable technologies of the future. And to the major economies, let us be frank, the onus is on us. We are the largest emitters of the past and the largest emitters today. We play the largest role in pulling the world back from the brink of climate disaster. and we all have further to go. We can do all this knowing that it comes with opportunity and that’s what the private sector is telling us today, increasingly moving to sustainable investment. They are committing trillions of dollars now to make climate change central to investment strategy and meanwhile, in spite of the havoc wreaked by COVID-19, the world did see the unprecedented growth and renewable energy that we were able to produce in 2020.

So, think about it my friends, the highest valued automobile company in the world, Tesla, it only makes electric vehicles. Mitsubishi is building the world’s largest zero emissions steel plant in Austria. They know climate action is a golden opportunity and all the world can share in it, but it won’t happen on its own. It’s not automatic, it’s not preordained. 250 companies, for instance, account for a third of global emissions and yet, 41 of them haven’t set goals for reducing emissions. So, we much mast – we have to match policy to potential.

In two days, we meet at the Ministerial level to prepare for the G20 in October. We will meet in Italy, the co-presidency of the COP, and success at this week’s gathering of the world’s biggest emitters can help smooth the road for success, when all the world gathers together in Glasgow this November. So, the world will be watching what they do. We need the G20 to lead in word and deed, so that all the world can lead in Glasgow.

My friends, there is still time to put a safer 1.5° Centigrade future back within reach, but only if every major economy commits to meaningful reductions by 2030. That is the only way to put the world on a credible track to global net-zero by mid-century. At or before COP26, we need to see the major economies of the world not just be ambitious or set ambitious targets, but we got to have clear plans for how we’re going to get there over the next decade.

By 2023, we need those same economies to put out roadmaps for how they’re going to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. Commitments have to be backed up by concrete national action plans. The time for talking is long since passed. We need to match suitable investment, both from public and private sector. We need to really rethink the multi-developmental banks process, how we de-risk, how we allocate capital and how we will grow our ways out of this. We can and must achieve this together, especially knowing the triumph or tragedy of the two alternative worlds that await our choices.

I believe we will get to the low carbon economy we urgently need, but it is not clear to me yet that we will get there in time. It’s what we’ve always done when we know that the world needs it most. We can come together, but it’s up to us to prove to ourselves and to the generation protesting in the streets that we are prepared to do it again, that we are the problem solvers, not just dreamers, not talkers, we’re the doers, not the deniers, that our words about ambition will be matched by ambitious actions.

My friends, Glasgow is the place, 2021 is the time and we can, in a little more than 100 days, save the next 100 years. Thank you [applause].

Dr Robin Niblett CMG

Secretary Kerry, thank you for those very powerful remarks. We had a few people who had a few questions, which we’d love to be able to follow-up on. I wonder what the questions will be, ‘cause I feel like you’ve answered every single one of them in advance. Hopefully, you’ve got your water well set under there. We won’t spend too long, ‘cause I think we’ve got to give everyone…

John Kerry

It’s great.

Dr Robin Niblett CMG

…a chance to go forward. So, what I’m going to do, if that’s alright, is actually group two and two, so two questions, two questions, and we will definitely call it quits at that point. So let me, again, thank you for making those remarks, call on a couple of points. I’ve got Rachel Morison from Bloomberg. We thought we’d get a couple of questions from the media side, as well as from the non-media side. So, Rachel, over to you first, please.

Rachel Morison

Thanks very much. When will the US outline its contribution to the $100 billion a year in finance that’s needed to help the poorest nations move away from fossil fuels and how much could you pledge? Thank you.

John Kerry

When – what was the start of that question?

Rachel Morison

When will you outline your contribution, the US contribution to the $100 billion a year in finance that’s needed?

Dr Robin Niblett CMG

The 100 billion total, yeah, and Kate Hampton, CEO of Children Investment Fund Foundation?

Kate Hampton

Thank you, Secretary Kerry. You’ve articulated closing the gap requires this virtual circle of commitment and public and private finance for delivery. Please can you give us some sense – elaborate on what you said about mobilising the resources that can help break some of the diplomatic deadlock ahead of COP26 and keep us accelerating after COP26.

Dr Robin Niblett CMG

Do you – so, do you want me to take all four and just have them ready to go, then you can time it? What would you prefer?

John Kerry

Do you want to get the others?

Dr Robin Niblett CMG

Why don’t we do that, and I think you can manage…

John Kerry

Okay.

Dr Robin Niblett CMG

…the time, yeah?

John Kerry

Yeah.

Dr Robin Niblett CMG

So, let me keep it going, ‘cause that way I think it will work best. Tom Clarke from ITV News, please. The boom’s coming to you there. Sorry, it’ll pick you up.

Tom Clarke

Thank you very much, Secretary Kerry. Our programme has been investigating Amazon Corporation.

John Kerry

Can you put the mic closer to him?

Tom Clarke

Can you hear me? Let me help you. I’ll hold it like this. It’s fine.

Dr Robin Niblett CMG

Okay, go.

Tom Clarke

Bit of professional training here. Our programme has been investigating the Amazon Corporation, one of America’s most influential companies, and we’ve revealed the fact that it’s regularly throwing away millions…

John Kerry

For some reason…

Tom Clarke

Can you hear…?

John Kerry

…you’re getting…

Dr Robin Niblett CMG

Yeah, so if…

John Kerry

…swallowed up.

Tom Clarke

No, bad audio? How about – is that better? Is that better, Secretary Kerry?

John Kerry

Little better, yeah.

Tom Clarke

Is that easier to – yeah, okay, fantastic. Our programme’s been investigating Amazon, one of the most recognisable companies in the world, which has been found to be throwing away millions of items. Shall we do this face-to-face?

Dr Robin Niblett CMG

Yes. We’re going to – keep using the boom, ‘cause you’ll need it for the sound, for recording.

Tom Clarke

We’ve been investigating Amazon, the comp – corporation is throwing away millions of items of unused, perfectly new goods here in the UK every year and it’s happening around the world. I want to get your reaction to that and also to find out whether you think we can do more to penalise companies that put profits before the planet. And I’d also like to know your thoughts on the British Government. When we sit down to host COP in November, we’re expecting it to grant a licence for a very large offshore oil and gas project in the North Sea. What would your message be to the UK Government North Sea Oil and Gas Project we’re expected to get the go ahead in November, what’s your reaction to that?

Dr Robin Niblett CMG

Last question, Rachel, and while you digest that quite long question. Yeah, Rebecca Peters is next, who is the Leland Foundation Association of Marshall Scholars Fellow. Where’s the boom, folks? Boom coming, here it comes. Rebecca, there you go, just while you digest that.

Rebecca Peters

Thank you so much. Thank you, Secretary Kerry. You’ve mentioned the mutually entwined fates and responsibilities of the US and China, suggesting it’s less of a question of whether or not the US and China co-operate, but how. So, in the next 100 days before COP26, what concrete actions could the US and China take together to strengthen the necessary solidarity and trust underpinning the Paris Agreement? Thank you.

John Kerry

[Pause] Oh, thank you all, very, very much. $100 billion, we have had many very key discussions about that in recent days. I personally talked to the President about it. President Biden has indicated to me his complete and total commitment to helping to make that happen. We are engaged in discussions with – I’m sure it’ll be part of the topic when we get to Naples for the G20 this week and it should be. And President Biden has already pledged to treble the resilience funding, to double the adaptation funding and more importantly, in the G7, he had a conversation with all of the leaders there and he laid out a conjectural figure, but a serious one. And just yesterday, I had a conversation with Brian Deese, who’s working this in the Council of Economic Advisors, and I believe we’re going to find a way to do it. We have to do it.

Let me just say, from my point of view, if the West, the developed world, whatever you want to call the collaboration of large economies, if they don’t come together and produce that, it’s going to be exceedingly hard to get any kind of broad base agreement similar to what I’ve described here today. There has to be good faith by everybody here and we’re not exempt from that, and I think we also accept that we have a special obligation, given the last four years of our absence, to make good on promises that were made and that need to come forward, so we will do that. And it’ll happen before, you know, it’ll happen before Glasgow, but it may well happen by the UN or so, it’s hard to tell. We just need to – I don’t want to make a date promise. I can tell you Glasgow is obviously the deadline, and if we don’t have it well before Glasgow, it will affect the Glasgow dynamic, I think.

On the second question about – from Kate Hampton about mobilising resources afterwards, let me tell you what I’ve been doing and what a lot of people have been doing. I left being Secretary of State, drawing the conclusion, probably not brilliant, but practical, that the private sector is ultimately going to play an absolute outsized, oversized, critical role in securing our victory here. No government in the world has the money that makes up what the UN Finance Gap Report indicates are – is needed. We’re looking at anywhere from 2.6 trillion to four trillion a year for the next 30 years and that’s not going to come from a government treasury. So, I’ve worked very hard, and others have too. You know, Mark Carney and Mike Bloomberg, a bunch of people have been working at trying to build coalitions. So, I talked with the six largest banks in America and some people criticised me and said, “What are you talking to the banks for?” Well, there was a famous bank robber in America called Willie Sutton and he was asked, “Why do you rob banks?” and he said, “Well, that’s where the money is.”

So, you know, we need banks, we need money to do this, and a lot of CEOs have now come onboard, recognising there’s ESG considerations, environment, social, government goals that are very much a part of the corporate boardroom today. There are the Sustainable Development Goals, and major corporations are now all announcing they will be net-zero by 2050 and they’re laying out plans for them and their supply chains to do that. So, I – the banks that I sat with, the six major banks in America, came together and they announced, voluntarily, on their own, that they are prepared to invest together $4.16 trillion over the next ten years into climate related investment.

Now, that’s a floor, not a ceiling, and that’s without the Asset Managers. Larry Fink of BlackRock has made it very clear that he is going to allocate and get his clients to be willing to accept investments in these particular sectors and he thinks there’ll be in a trillion to – I mean, I don’t want to speak for him, but a lot of money is available from Asset Managers other countries, that’s just the US. Other alliances have come together and there may be as many as 45/50 banks around the world joining into an alliance, net-zero, going to Glasgow, and that’s going to provide resource. So, when we set down with Prime Minister Modi, we had talked to a number of countries, like the UAE and Sweden and France, Germany, Britain, others, and said, “Will you partner with us to help India be able to deploy these – this solar goal?” And so, we can bring finance and we can bring technology to the table. They’ve got to bring the ability to break through their bureaucracy and to have the revenue stream collected from the people who use the electricity.

But electricity produces revenue, folks, if it’s done properly. Transportation produces elec – wat – yeah, water can produce revenue. Where you have a revenue stream that is sufficient, you can actually go to the marketplace and finance these agreements. We’re just not doing it. The whole model of the International Development Banks, etc., seems to be stagnant, if you will. We need to get going and come together and as we get into disclosure, a very critical element of finance, banks and investors are going to be required to do risk analysis on their investments, and if they’re looking at investing something that may disappear because of climate crisis, there’s going to be a risk level that’s going to change, in terms of the cost of financing.

So, disclosure will be a very important part of the allocation of assets to this endeavour. It’s not that we don’t know how to do a lot of these things, we’re just not co-ordinating it. We’re not bringing it together sufficiently, so we’re creating the critical mass. One of the things we’re doing is that we’ve been working on a thing called the First Movers Coalition. I’m not going to announce all of it today, but the whole purpose is to begin to create bigger demand in markets than there is today by getting people to agree they’re going to have supply chains that do certain kinds of things, that keep faith with that.

So, that’s really, I think – the resources cater to a large measure, are going to be an amalgamation of public finance, which will not be as enormous, of risk assumption finance, perhaps even philanthropies can help there, and then finally, the pure investment finance, which I think – I mean, look at the market. The energy market, energy policy is the principle, energy policy and nature-based policy are the two biggest solutions to this challenge. Energy policy itself is the largest market, already today, that the world has ever known. Think of that.

I represented Massachusetts in the Senate for 28 years. We had, yeah, Harvard and MIT and countless, Worcester and technology and, you know, great efforts, but we – in the 1990s, a lot of wealth was created, but it was a miniscule market, technology in the 90s, a $1 trillion market, a billion users. We’re looking at a multi double digit trillion market today with already four to five billion users. Going up in the next 30 years, for better or worse, to about nine to ten billion users.

So, that is, I think, the mother of all markets and I think that’s a reason that we can look forward to the private sector, and whoever discovers battery storage that lasts for a week or two week, it’s over, we’ve won the battle. Whoever comes up with a green hydrogen at a price that is less than, kind of, fossil fuel, it’s over, we’ve won the battle. This is winnable and that’s what we’ve got to understand, but we just can’t sit around waiting.

Amazon Corporation and profits, etc., etc. Amazon, I think, is emerging and developing and I know some of the folks there and have talked to them. I think they’re becoming more and more engaged in, for instance, electrifying their fleet of vehicles, making sure their aeroplanes become more sensitive, they’re using fuel, dealing with packaging. Packaging is a real challenge. I mean, we all hate it when we get this enormous package and you open it and whoa, it’s like that Christmas game and then there’s a tiny package inside and you open that and, you know, it’s a little trying, and I think they’re working on that, too. So, I – my sense is that I just had a meeting with CEOs of – including Amazon, and Apple, and UPS, and a bunch of these folks came together, and they were very seized by this issue, and I’m encouraged that I think, in the recent – next days, we’ll see more and more coming out of them.

On the North Sea oil and gas, yeah, I don’t know enough about the particular mix and timing of the projects in UK, but I…

Dr Robin Niblett CMG

If you don’t want to take it, yeah, you don’t need to take that one if you don’t want to.

John Kerry

But I’m mindful of what the IEA has said that we don’t need new oil, gas, coal projects, and I think people have to measure the need very, very carefully in making those decisions.

And finally, how do you get China to co-operate? I – you know, I – we’ve had an ongoing conversation with China for the last months, since I came in, January 20th, and I bel – I am friends, genuine friends, and I admire the work that XIE Zhenhua has done in China, and many of you know him. We’ve met with their team in person, in Shanghai, and we’ve had about 13 or 14 virtual meetings. I think we have another meeting next week, and I look forward to working with China, to having, you know, not a hardened position by either of us, but something that’s based on the science, based on expert advice about what’s achievable, at what rate. I think the key is that we work together with China to get there. We currently have a tentative trip planned for the end of August and I’m very hopeful that we can make progress with China in the next weeks.

But I just have to be clear that there are certain mathematical, arithmetic, numbers that tell us certain things that we must respond to and if we can get on the same page understanding that as a starting place, we’ll work very hard with China to make sure that there is a reasonable and a pre – you know, a fair and appropriate effort by both of us. We both need to raise ambition. We’re not here pointing the finger. We’re not here to create anything except progress and we hope that can happen, and I think China could be so critical to this. China was key to helping us in 2013, we came together. I think we can come together again, and I hope we will. Thank you all very, very much. Thanks [applause] [pause].