Former US climate envoy and Secretary of State John Kerry has lamented the lack of progress in global climate negotiations on transitioning away from fossil fuels over the last two years.
Kerry told an audience of climate professionals at London’s Chatham House think-tank on Tuesday that he was still “reeling a little bit” from the COP30 climate summit in Belém, which he did not attend.
When going through papers at his home in Boston recently, he said he had found the front page of The Guardian from December 2023 with the headline: “Landmark COP28 deal agreed to transition away from fossil fuels”.
Kerry said that deal in Dubai, which he was involved in as the US’s lead negotiator at the time, was the “most important single mission statement since Paris”. But, he asked in London two years on, “what happened to the promise that we made future generations?”
According to Kerry, at COP30, a draft text of the main political decision was put forward that was “so weak that our friends from the European Union, backed by the [UK’s] Starmer government, actually had to take the unusual step of threatening to walk out and protest”.
Kerry said this was because – in the words of the EU’s top climate official Wopke Hoekstra – the text contained “no science” and “no transitioning away, but instead weakness”. In the end, they had to back down on getting a roadmap in the text, amid strong push-back from major fossil fuel producing nations.
He also cited the New York Times’ headline on Saturday which ran, “Oil producers – but maybe not the planet – get a win as climate talks end”. Kerry said “that headline underscores that there’s really been a change in the last two years – a change that has been purposefully fought for and achieved by the expenditure of billions of dollars to pass on disinformation and to attack common sense itself”.
China escapes scrutiny
He blamed this backtracking since COP28 partly on the administration of Donald Trump pulling the US out of the Paris Agreement, which gave “new life” to “old excuses” for other countries like China.
Kerry, a semi-retired diplomat who enjoyed cordial relations with his Chinese counterpart, said China now “enjoys newfound freedom from scrutiny”, adding that in his time in the Obama and Biden administrations, the US had successfully pressured China to do more on climate change.
One developed-country diplomat told Climate Home News that, at COP30, China and Saudi Arabia were under less pressure to support a roadmap away from fossil fuels than would have been the case if a Democrat-run US had been at the talks. This time the US sent no official delegation.
Kerry said he would push Australia, which will run negotiations at COP31, to get discussions back on track by summoning the 20-25 nations most responsible for climate change, whose emissions cover about 80% of the global total, and try to get them to agree to a roadmap.
Australian climate minister Chris Bowen, who is set to lead the talks next year, said on Saturday that he and the Pacific Islands would “push to advance” a transition away from fossil fuels.
Instead of a negotiated plan, the COP30 Brazilian presidency has promised to produce a global roadmap on transitioning away from fossil fuels outside of the UN climate process, and report back on it at the next COP. Colombia and the Netherlands will co-host an international conference on the issue in April.
To laughter, Kerry ended his speech by saying that the battle can still be won if the opponents of fossil fuels “get your ass in gear to do the things you need to do”.
