Secretary of State John Kerry told a group of students on Wednesday the government is “spending billions” of “your parents’ money” to combat the effects of climate change.
Kerry explained during his visit to Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Md., that the “long-term future of this planet” depends on dealing with and understanding “the crisis of the ocean as it is linked to the challenge of climate change, as it is linked to the quality of life that we have here on Earth itself.”
“So we’re spending billions of dollars today of taxpayer money. Your parents’ money is going to pay for the harder impact of storms that we’re suffering — much more damage than ever before as a result of the intensity of the storms that we suffer because of climate change,” he said.
Kerry said he came to the school because the State Department has announced its third annual Our Ocean conference this September, which is aimed at “bringing people from all over the world” to talk about how “we deal with these challenges, and what are we going to do to make sure that your generation inherits an ocean that we all grew up with learning how to appreciate and love?”
“Bottom line is, folks, we rely on the oceans on this planet for life itself, particularly because of the oxygen cycle,” Kerry said before giving the students a science lesson on the planet’s carbon cycle.
“So you can see, and all of you don’t need me to tell you about it, because you’re smarter than I am and you know the connections of these dots and the impact that it has potentially on our lives, on fisheries in the future,” he said.
After one student asked him what the ocean would look like 100 years from now if humans continue along the present course, Kerry said he could not predict the consequences with “absolute precision.” But he said he expected ocean levels to rise dramatically.
Kerry said the rising tide is already creating refugees, and said there are “island states where their leaders are talking about where they’re going to move to — a whole nation-state — and where they’re going to go live.”
Though Kerry said climate change is creating “huge challenges,” he argued that “the power to solve this problem is in our hands.”
“The solution to climate change is very simple — energy policy … if we can transition to clean, alternative, renewable energy, and begin to minimize the quotient of the fossil fuels that are really negative, we have a chance of avoiding the worst impacts. That’s why this is so urgent, and that’s why I’m here today. Because we’re trying to raise people’s consciousness about just how serious this challenge really is.”
