John Forbes Kerry, reporting for duty. Again.
Actually, this is the third time. He enlisted in the Naval Reserve in 1966, at the height of the Vietnam War. He used that reporting-for-duty line, along with a smart Navy salute, the night 19 Julys ago when he accepted the Democratic presidential nomination in his hometown of Boston. Now he is reporting for duty in Beijing.
This is the third time since Joe Biden appointed Kerry his presidential envoy for climate change that he is bringing his environmental traveling salvation show to China. In recent years, he has met Chinese officials in Sweden, Germany and Switzerland in an effort to win cooperation in fighting global warming. The fight goes on as Kerry — perhaps with tacit apologies to Greta Thunberg, the 20-year-old Swedish environmental activist who has foresworn air travel — takes flight.
Kerry — a former secretary of state and senator for more than a quarter-century — was the American who signed the Paris Climate Accord, only to see President Donald Trump, who considers climate change a “fraud,” repudiate it. In a crowded lifetime that is in its 80th year, he has had many causes — first for victory in Vietnam, then for withdrawal from Vietnam and finally for elected office, beginning with a doomed candidacy for the House but followed by successful runs for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts and the Senate before narrowly losing the 2004 presidential election to George W. Bush.
But to him, this one matters the most.
“It’s obviously an extremely important problem,” he told me in a telephone call from London, where he was involved in the meeting between Biden and King Charles III even as he was prepping for his mission to Beijing. “It’s of the highest order — in single digits — of major threats to the planet. So many people are affected simultaneously. Some of it is irreversible. Once you go beyond tipping points — the Arctic or the Antarctic melting, coral reefs being affected — you don’t reverse that. Permafrost itself is releasing great masses of methane. It’s very damaging.”
Kerry has zeal for this cause, but it is not the zeal of the convert. He compiled a 91% lifetime pro-environmental score from the League of Conservation Voters during his Senate years, lining up against offshore drilling in 2009 and 2011 and against oil-shale development as long ago as 2008. He represented the United States at international climate negotiations in Rio de Janeiro, Kyoto, Buenos Aires, The Hague, Bali, Poznan and Copenhagen.
As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when world leaders were meeting in 2012 for the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, Kerry sought to alert his colleagues to the impending disaster.
“Every major national science academy in the world has reported that global warming is real,” he said in a floor speech. “It is nothing less than shocking when people in a position of authority can just say — without documentation, without accepted scientific research, without peer-reviewed analysis — just stand up and say that there isn’t enough evidence because it suits their political purposes to serve some interest that doesn’t want to change the status quo.”
Americans have known about climate change for decades, and in some ways the earliest warnings about greenhouse gases came two centuries ago. In 1956, when Kerry was 13 years old, Time magazine warned that “if the blanket of CO2 produces a temperature rise of only one or two degrees, a chain of secondary effects may come into play.” Of course, hardly anyone paid attention. Many of us snoozy scholars in the Elementary Meteorology class that Gordon MacDonald, a pioneer in warning about climate change, taught at Dartmouth College in the winter of 1973 — that was exactly 50 years ago — either were dozing off during class or swiftly forgot his dire remarks about the greenhouse effect.
So we had no excuses. What we know now, even if we are nodding off reading news accounts or watching news broadcasts, is that the Time warning was eerily, precisely right. So was MacDonald, both in the basement of Silsby Hall and in a 1980 Capitol Hill hearing before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, when he responded to a series of searing questions from Sen. Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts, whose retirement opened the seat for Kerry:
“While we cannot forecast in detail the climate in the coming decades, we can with some confidence predict that there will be significant changes. … [T]he dilemma we face is of historic proportions. Economies around the world depend on the use of energy derived from carbon-based fuels. The continued use of these fuels will irreversibly change global climate, placing heavy stresses on societies around the world.”
From MacDonald’s lips to Kerry’s ears.
“It is a very, very serious political equation,” Kerry told me. “It’s not some debatable curve. It’s a clear choice between unabated emissions and capturing emissions — or not making them. We only have two choices. This is not a big ‘rocket-science’ question. These things have been predicted for 25 or 30 years, and people have been fighting over them every successive decade. We ought to be tired of the fighting. We know what we have to do.”
But hold it. The message Kerry is bringing to Beijing is not only of peril, but also of possibility — not only of oncoming disaster but also of future opportunity. He sees the new, green economy and the “revolution” — that’s his word — that it brings as an analogue to the liberations, economic and cultural, prompted by the Industrial Revolution.
“We can have electric charging stations, we can build out a new grid, we can build the economic system of the future just as we built the economic system of the Industrial Revolution,” he said. “A lot of people made money and got good jobs in the Industrial Revolution transformation.”
In his conversations this week with, among others, his Chinese counterpart, Xie Zhenhua, Kerry expects to set out some of those opportunities.
“Every economy will be involved in the transformation,” he said. “We have all kinds of transportation systems that can be built. A lot of the developing world wants to develop in a thoughtful way, and in their development plans they are waiting. There’s a huge amount of sustainable development to be done.”
(David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)
