MADRID — Former Secretary of State John Kerry is pitching a new climate change initiative, World War Zero, to marry the demands of grassroots activists with top-level efforts to push policy changes.
He is hoping the combination can mobilize voters to boot President Trump and others who don’t see climate change as a top concern out of office. And Kerry is asking youth activists frustrated with the old guard to give a chance to his group full of politicians, celebrities, and other elites.
“We both traveled the same journey. I was once that kid in the street,” Kerry said during remarks Wednesday at the United Nations climate talks in Madrid. “I organized. I know what it means. I’ve been arrested.”
The former secretary of state referred a number of times to his actions protesting the Vietnam War in the 1960s. That included when he was asked by a student in the audience why his new initiative framed efforts to address climate change as a “war” when Kerry touted fighting for peace.
Kerry said the name, World War Zero, initially gave him pause, too, but ultimately he came to the conclusion it was necessary to fight fire with fire.
“People have declared a war on us, on science,” Kerry said, adding that he is “trying to stop” the war and wants to “win the peace.”
But Kerry also stressed that activists also can’t write off working with unlikely allies. Kerry’s group includes Republicans such as former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, with whom he says he’ll travel the country to hold town halls about climate change.
“We have to have some people at the table to talk to some of the people who aren’t at the table,” he said. “It doesn’t do any good to talk to yourself.”
Kerry said his group doesn’t plan to endorse any particular candidate and won’t necessarily be trying to form a consensus view on climate policy. He said he understands members of his coalition hold different views on the role of natural gas in a low-carbon economy, for example.
“We’re not going to tell them who to vote for. We’re not going to start endorsing one candidate or another,” Kerry said. “We’re going to endorse the notion that this issue has got to be primary in everybody’s minds, and we have to vote for the future.”
However, Kerry did say fairly explicitly that a second Trump term wouldn’t be acceptable. Kerry has endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden in the 2020 race, though he didn’t mention Biden in his remarks.
He instead slammed Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, a situation that has put U.S. career negotiators in Madrid in a tricky spot as they participate in talks over the last few elements of the rules to implement the Paris pact.
The White House submitted the formal paperwork to withdraw from the deal last month, and the exit will formally take effect in November 2020.
Trump’s move to withdraw “did have a negative effect” in “taking some of the countries that were already reluctantly participating and empowering them to pull back,” Kerry said. “That’s why negotiations in Poland were so difficult,” he added, referring to last year’s climate talks.
The negotiations have run into similar trouble this year, with countries making little progress in the first week of talks on critical issues related to carbon markets and money to pay for climate damages in the most vulnerable nations.
Kerry, who helped negotiate the Paris Agreement when he was secretary of state, said any next president must re-engage forcefully in the climate negotiations, as well as bring together financiers and industry sectors to demand a transition to a zero-carbon economy.
He also suggested the world should be spending much more to help out developing countries as they transition to cleaner economies and deal with the effects of climate change. That latter aspect has been a critical point of disagreement at this year’s climate talks — how much money developed countries should have to contribute to help low-lying island nations and other most vulnerable countries adapt.
Kerry said the Green Climate Fund, the U.N.’s pot of money to help developing nations, “doesn’t have enough money in it, not by any sense of the imagination.”
