Secretary of State John Kerry said Thursday that the path of the climate change skeptic is clear: “Utter catastrophe.”
“What if the climate skeptics are wrong?” Kerry asked while speaking on climate change at the Atlantic Council in Washington. “The answer,” he said, “utter catastrophe” and life as we know it vanishing.
“There is no Planet B.”
Kerry used the speech to address policymakers on Capitol Hill and elsewhere that doubt the science of climate change.
But Kerry’s remarks, ahead ofmajor climate negotiations in Paris in December,may suggest a sense of desperation from the Obama administration. Advocates of of President Obama’s climate agenda fear that if Republicans succeed in opposing high-agenda items such as Environmental Protection Agency’s power-plant rules, it could reduce the U.S.’s ability to negotiate and lead other countries to increase their commitments to cut their greenhouse gas emissions, which scientists blame for driving manmade climate change.
The U.S.-China deal on emissions reductions was an “enormous achievement and it had an impact” in adding “momentum” to the Paris talks, Kerry said, challenging critics who say that China effectively has to do nothing while the U.S. makes broad cuts. But “now we need more countries” to join the U.S. to “create a grassroots movement” that will help every country reduce the carbon reductions required to end climate change.
He said the U.S. cannot make the reductions required to solve the problem alone, and must get other countries, like it did with China, to make the necessary commitments.
The U.S. cannot “foot this bill alone,” he said. Even if all citizens in the U.S. biked to work, it would not work. It requires a “global solution.”
Kerry said the U.S. would urge commitments from the developing world, a key sticking point in previous negotiations in which smaller emerging economies have pushed for lower, or no, commitments in favor of industrialized countries doing the bulk of the heavy lifting.
The next major round of the United Nations-led climate negotiations will begin Nov. 30 in Paris, with a new international deal expected to be hammered out in December.
The goal of the conference will be to achieve a legally binding, global agreement on climate change, with commitments from all nations.
The White House is seeking an arrangement that wouldn’t require Senate approval — likely by agreeing to a legally enforceable system of reviewing country pledges, but not to a specific, legally enforceable emissions cut. The administration wants to avoid going through the Senate because it’s likely it wouldn’t get the 67 votes needed from the GOP-led upper chamber to ratify an international treaty.
In December “we will see if we can muster the collective political will,” Kerry said. He said it “won’t totally … eliminate the threat,” but it will be “a first step … that will set the market moving” toward meeting the global challenge.
If the U.S. fails to lead, Kerry said, history will judge that when the science was there nothing was done. “We will have no excuses.”
