And Kerry faces problems at home, too: It’s still unclear whether Congress will pass President Joe Biden’s climate and economy bill, which includes billions of dollars in clean energy tax credits.
“He was a very effective envoy trying to get people to be more ambitious,” John Podesta, the Obama administration’s top climate adviser, told CNN of Kerry. “With Putin’s attack on Ukraine, diplomacy becomes all the more difficult.”
But Kerry’s message is simple: The climate crisis must not lag behind near-term growth in fossil fuels while the world processes the energy crisis.
“Obviously the whole gas and fuel picture of Europe changed overnight,” Kerry told CNN. “It’s not fun, but we have to get through it. [Climate change] is not something that passes. Because Putin invaded Ukraine, it doesn’t mean, ‘okay, the climate is over and we don’t have to worry about it.’”
It is still too early to say with certainty whether Russia’s war in Ukraine and the resulting energy shortages will be good or bad for the climate in the long term. But in the short term, as countries rush back to traditional fossil fuels to fill the gaps, it’s terrible.
Kerry warned that any short-term increase in domestic fossil fuel production must be just that: short-term and phased out.
“This is not a free license to come in and pollute like crazy,” Kerry said. “It has to be a responsible effort to fill a gap in the short term, but with a clear plan of where you’re going in terms of reducing emissions.”
The latest report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says the world has less than three years to peak in emissions and decarbonize rapidly. Countries must abandon fossil fuels as soon as possible, switch to cheaper renewable energy, and actively remove carbon from the air for any hope of keeping global temperatures under control. We have plenty of cheap wind and solar energy; what’s missing is the political will to get there, scientists say.
Kerry’s job now is to convey that political will.
“There’s a beautiful saying: diplomacy is the art of doing what someone else wants,” his former chief deputy Jonathan Pershing told CNN. “Kerry is very good at it.”
‘Can you walk faster?’
There’s also a tricky geopolitical map that could emerge from the Russia-Ukraine conflict, with two blocs of countries: one committed to renewable energy and the other choosing to stick with fossil fuels, he said Podesta to CNN.
“You have an international environment that feels like it’s splitting into two camps,” Podesta said, putting the US and Western Europe in one camp and Russia, China and Saudi Arabia in the other. “It’s possible that you really – in a way we haven’t had since the 1990s – have an east bloc and a west bloc. If that happens, what does it mean for the climate? Kerry’s instinct is, I think, to try and hold the global system together, but that could be a lot harder.”
Podesta said he could see China easily becoming the leader of a bloc that was “both strategic and economic.”
“The question is, do they want to be the leader of the old economy while Europe and the US try to create a new economy?” he said.
China reached an agreement with the US at the UN climate summit COP26 last fall to reduce its emissions of methane – a powerful gas for warming the planet. Implementing this deal remains a key goal of the Biden administration. Kerry said China is working on a specific and “ambitious” plan detailing how they will cut methane emissions – a plan that could also impact the country’s coal consumption, as much of China’s methane comes from coal.
“We never stopped talking to China,” Kerry said. “Obviously, if you can’t get China to do enough, we can’t get where we want to be. So it’s very, very important to continue working with them.”
Kerry made two personal trips to China ahead of COP26 last year and told CNN he continues to have virtual meetings with China’s climate envoy Xie Zhenhua. Those virtual meetings continued into 2022, and Kerry told CNN he hopes for a regular schedule of meetings between the two countries.
Pershing told CNN that Kerry’s relationship with China’s climate chief Xie Zhenhua remains of paramount importance.
“They disagree on some very basic things, but they respect each other enough to commit to each other,” said Pershing, who left Kerry’s office late last year to join William and Flora as director of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s environmental program return to Hewlett Foundation.
The face-to-face meetings combined with regular virtual engagement have enabled the U.S. and China to have a relationship that has opened some doors, Pershing said.
“Has it changed the underlying US-China dynamic? Not really,” he added. “But it wasn’t that [Kerry’s] Intent – his intention was to open the door wide enough to have a successful negotiation on a climate agenda.”
Nonetheless, China remains an ongoing challenge. A slowdown in domestic economic growth and concerns about energy security have prompted the country to double coal use to build more infrastructure and turn on the lights.
“The country suffered from nationwide power shortages last fall,” Li Shuo, a climate analyst at Greenpeace in China, told CNN. “This – coupled with the ongoing crisis in Ukraine – is creating a strong desire for stability and self-sufficiency. More charcoal helps calm that fear.”
Shuo noted that China started approving new coal-fired power plants earlier this year, and more coal-promoting measures are likely to follow later. But at the same time, he and Pershing said China is investing in renewable energy at an incredible rate. China is a global leader in expanding its renewable energy capacity, accounting for 43% of global renewable capacity growth and adding nearly 50 gigawatts of offshore wind in 2021 alone.
Pershing noted that the city of Shenzhen in China has more electric buses than the rest of the world combined.
“This is not a failure,” Pershing said. “It’s ‘can you go faster?'” Pershing said.
Shuo said renewable energy is boosting China’s economy in a similar way to coal-fired power plants, so it will continue to grow rapidly in the country.
“Our challenge is to say goodbye to the old and dirty in building new and clean energy,” Shuo said.
The climate at home
Far from his diplomatic trips, one of Kerry’s biggest challenges this year could be what’s happening at home.
Kerry told CNN his team’s main task as we head towards COP27 in Sharm-el-Sheikh, Egypt this year will be to push other countries to meet the goals they set in Glasgow. But US targets also remain unmet — Biden’s goal of halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 largely depends on whether a climate bill passes Congress.
With six months to go before the UN summit in Egypt and the midterm elections, Democrats have a very limited window of opportunity to pass legislation, and their alternate vote belongs to West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin — the Biden’s bigger bill and his $555 billion killed in funding climate and clean energy last year.
Spurred in part by Europe’s energy crisis, Manchin is back in talks with the White House over a smaller clean energy bill. Kerry recently had dinner with Manchin while the two were in Paris for an international energy conference and said a climate bill passed by the Senate this year is a “real possibility”.
“I don’t want to speculate what will happen if we don’t,” Kerry told CNN. “I will rely on us to do it because we have to do it.”
Without legislative progress, US influence at COP27 could decline. And other countries have asked US climate diplomats where the domestic congressional action is.
“They ask – and they should ask,” Pershing said, referring to the “checkered history” and inconsistent US climate policy that has ebbed and flowed with the whims of every president.
Still, the fact that Kerry is staying in his role longer than many expected is a win for international climate diplomacy, said those close to Biden’s envoys.
“Kerry is standing too,” Pershing said. “It means that people respect him, listen to him, give him access to discussions.”