U.S. Efforts to Address the Climate Crisis with Special Presidential Envoy Kerry

THE WASHINGTON FOREIGN PRESS CENTER, WASHINGTON, D.C.

MODERATOR:  Let’s get started.  Good morning, and welcome to the Washington Foreign Press Center.  My name is Doris Robinson, and I am the media relations officer here at the Foreign Press Center and the moderator.

Today it is my pleasure to introduce U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry.  Today, Mr. Kerry will discuss his time as the U.S. Government’s top climate envoy, including administration achievements and ongoing priorities to combat climate change.

Just a reminder that this briefing is on the record.  We will post a transcript later today at fpc.state.gov.  For journalists on Zoom, please make sure your name and media outlet is with your profile.

And with that, I would like – now like to introduce Mr. Kerry to begin with opening remarks.

SECRETARY KERRY:  Thank you.  Doris, thank you very much.  I’m delighted to be in front of the largest podium I’ve ever been at in my life.  (Laughter.)  But it’s good to see you all here.  Thank you for taking time to come.  I’m just going to share a few thoughts with you quickly, and then we’ll try to get into the question as quickly as we can, obviously.

In November of 2020, when President-elect Biden called me about this job, he was, at the time, determined to earn back with appropriate humility America’s credibility, and to work with all countries – the world’s largest emitters particularly – in order to raise ambition and deal with this global crisis.

We held an historic leaders summit at the White House in the East Room virtually – you may recall, in the heart of the early days of COVID.  President Xi attended virtually, President Putin.  We had all the leaders of the top economies of the world.  And that was really the place where we began to try to raise urgency and ambition regarding the climate crisis.

The result of that was to actually raise the NDCs – national determined contributions – of countries around the world, and to begin to say to the world, look, we – the president preceding pulled out of Paris, had a different view about this issue, but we’re back to common sense and normality.  The President made it clear by signing the re-entry to the Paris Agreement within hours of being sworn on January 20th.

And as a centerpiece of that climate diplomacy, we began immediately to try to deal with the finance issue.  We were very sensitive to the fact that for a number of years, 100 billion had been promised from the developed world to the developing world that had not been delivered, and it was really a source of – a sore point, if you will, between countries.  So we wanted to eliminate that.  We wanted to address it.  And I’m proud to tell you that despite the cynicism and to some degree anger that existed, we actually delivered on the 100 billion in 2022.  And again in ’23, and again this year, we’re on track to do so.  So I think we’ve made a huge leap forward on that.

The President, when he came in, there was a residual amount of money that had been put in the budget by President Obama quickly before he left, realizing that there might be a problem – and he was right.  And so we had about 1.5 billion at that point in time.  We are today at about 9.5 billion and climbing to the 11 billion that the President promised this year.

To address the urgent needs of those on the front lines – because we were constantly hearing in my visits to Africa, to South Asia, Bangladesh, different places – we heard a great deal about vulnerability, and about the challenge of the developing world to be able to transition away from coal and into new sources of clean energy.  To help with that, President Biden announced his emergency program, the President’s Emergency Plan for Adaptation and Resilience, called PREPARE.  And the PREPARE program is now – it’s about $12 billion over three, four – four, five years.  And it is geared now – right now – seeking to help more than half a billion people worldwide to cope with the rising crisis of the climate crisis itself.

We put – amazingly, when I was in Paris, I remember well there was not any interest in a broad discussion about methane.  And methane was hardly mentioned, ironically, amazingly, because methane is responsible for 50 percent of warming the planet.  So in Glasgow, President Biden joined with President Ursula von der Leyen in order to put on the table the methane pledge.  And we started with about 20, 22 countries.  We now have 155 countries that have signed the methane pledge – most recently, I think, the – Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, which is important.  We put super-pollutants on the top of the agenda.

And through the Global Methane Pledge, we’re now on track – we believe – in a lot of countries to hit the target of a 30 percent reduction by 2030, which is absolutely essential.  And methane presents an even bigger challenge, because with the thawing of the permafrost, methane is coming up just naturally through the earth.  And that’s what we call fugitive gas, and it’s very complicated to try to be able to grab that gas and put it to use.

We mobilized over $1 billion at UAE COP in Dubai, and we have seen new grant funding help to meet that goal ever since COP27.  We tapped into the power of private capital through the Agricultural Innovation Mission – the AIM4C program.  We started the First Movers Coalition, which has brought major companies, some of the top corporations in the world – Microsoft, Google, Apple, Salesforce, FedEx, Ford Motor Company, General Motors – a whole group of companies have pledged to buy green products now, and in doing so send a signal to the marketplace about the availability of solutions which other companies and other people could take advantage of.  And we hope that this is going to accelerate the production of green cement, green concrete, of dealing with the shipping industry, which I’ll mention something about for a minute.

The shipping – if shipping were a country globally, shipping would be the eighth largest emitter in the world.  And we now have major companies, shipping companies – NSC, Yara, Maersk, others – that have joined in converting their ships to carbon free propulsion.  And as a result of the IMO change in policy which we’ve been advocating and which took place last summer, we now see that the whole shipping fleet – maritime fleet of the world – will probably transition to zero carbon propulsion by the next 20 years.  That’s an enormous advance.

In addition, we – I think – helped in our negotiations with China to be able to really change people’s attitudes of what was possible.  And China came to the table.  China and the United States held four days of negotiations in Sunnylands, California after major negotiations in Davos, in Stockholm, in Berlin, in Beijing, in Tianjin, in Shanghai.  So we had a lot of meetings face to face, and we also had a lot of Zoom meetings and virtual meetings.

And in Dubai at – in building the UAE Consensus, we were able to bring people together around the idea that all greenhouse gases must be part of your NDC.  And next year that will be true that – we agreed that everybody must join in this effort.  We achieved something very significant in the UAE, which was what now really provides the UAE Consensus.  And that consensus begins with the words, “transitioning away from fossil fuel” – the first time in history that fossil fuel has been embraced within the confines of a COP agreement.

And that agreement means that not only will there be a transition away, but there are modifying phrases in that paragraph that are very critical.  And it says, in a fair, orderly, equitable manner so as to – accelerating in this decade – so as to achieve net zero 2050, according to the science.  “According to the science” means 1.5 degrees.  So there’s now a new urgency to trying to keep 1.5 degrees alive.  And in fact, the IEA tells us that if all the promises made in Glasgow and all the promises made at Sharm El-Sheikh are followed through on, we would be at 1.7 to 1.8 degrees of warming by 2050.  Now, we’re waiting to hear what difference does the UAE Consensus make in being able to move in that direction.  And we’re very hopeful that we will be pleasantly informed by the UAE.  We can’t speculate on what it will be now.

But what that tells us, folks – and I’ll just end on this point – what that tells us is that we have changed the dynamic from when I came into this job, we were heading somewhere outwards of four degrees of warming.  Now, we’re not yet holding yet at 1.5, we’re heading to 2.5, but that’s a lot better than where we were.  And there are new technologies coming online.  There’s incredible now energy in electrolyzers, hydrogen, battery storage, new batteries, fusion, the possibilities of exploitation of geothermal is much greater than it was, because we now have much greater knowledge about how to do it.

And so I’m personally optimistic, but only if we do the things we promised to do.  This will be expensive to make the transition through investment.  No country in the world has enough money to do this by itself.  But if we mobilize the private sector into infrastructure, new grids, water treatment facilities, transportation, laying down the power lines and so forth – those are jobs.  Those are jobs for electricians, and heavy equipment operators, and plumbers, and steel workers, and so forth.

And so this is a moment of looking at the greatest economic transition that is potential there, if we seize the baton and we go do it.  And it is larger even than the Industrial Revolution transformation that took place in the 1800s and early 1900s.  That’s our possibility, and there’s no question in my mind that if we do what we know how to do and what we promised to do, we will actually make the world – I mean, let me stop myself and just put one thing in front of you.

Currently 7 million people are dying around the world every year because of pollution, because of bad air quality.  That’s greenhouse gas pollution, folks.  We know what we have to do.  It’s the burning of fossil fuel and not capturing it, the emissions, that is the problem.  So we don’t need a new algorithm defined; we don’t need a rocket scientist to define what’s the problem.  We know what the problem is; it’s simple.  It’s us, the choices we make about how we light our homes, our factories, power our vehicles, and so forth.  And we have new technologies available now to avoid this crisis if we choose to do so.

That’s the test in front of the world.  And I intend to not move away from this fight.  While I’m leaving the job that I’m in today, I believe I’m going to liberate myself to actually be more engaged in the transition itself, trying to accelerate bringing the capital to the table, bringing the partnerships that are necessary.  It’s labor-intensive; it takes people on the ground.  But we have to create the bankable deals that will excite that capital so we can begin to grow in the different direction.  And we will wind up with a world that is safer, that is more prosperous, that is cleaner, and healthier.

And no one should doubt that that’s the other side of this journey of transition.  It’s positive.  It’s not something to be scared of.  It’s something to embrace, and the sooner we get to it, the sooner we’re able to enjoy the jobs and the benefits that will come with it.

So on that note, let me throw it open to your questions.

MODERATOR:  Thank you, sir.  Thank you for those – for your remarks.  We’ll now open for questions.  We’ll start in the room.  Please raise your hand, and I will call on you, and please state your name and your media outlet.  Let’s go to Alex.

QUESTION:  Good morning.  Thank you, Doris.  And Alex Raufoglu from Turan News Agency.  Mr. Secretary, thanks so much for coming here.  Let me pick up from where you have left off.  What would be the good outcome for upcoming summit look like?  How would you define that, given everything you said right now?

SECRETARY KERRY:  The next summit?

QUESTION:  Yeah, for Baku summit.  And also secondly, given the poor human rights records of the host country, do you have any concern about growing – growing concerns over Azerbaijan being the host country?  Thanks so much.

SECRETARY KERRY:  Well, let me begin by saying that the expectations of the next COP are actually defined already to some degree by the UAE Consensus.  The next COP is going to be largely focused on finance – not exclusively, but finance will be the big challenge.  Because the 100 billion annual donation language has expired, will expire, so now we need the successor on 100 billion.  And the question will be:  Will the donor base to that process grow?  Will other countries that could be capable of providing more income and more donation – will they, in fact, step up and help to accelerate this transition?

Secondly, there will obviously be further expectations and considerations regarding the new impact fund, the fund that’s been created to try to deal with the negative impacts and was stood up, appropriately, and everybody agreed to what it should be in the UAE Consensus.  And now that has to be given life even further in Baku.

And then finally, of course, the other commitments that had been made.  I mean, the COP obviously needs to embrace the full breadth of the UAE Consensus and make sure that that is really being implemented by countries.  And then finally, new NDCs are due next February, one year from now.  You don’t begin to work on those when you get to Baku.  You have to be working on those now so people can really begin to realize that you’re ready to take this where it needs to go coming February of next year with the new NDCs.  And that’s really critical for everybody.  Those are the key things, I think.

With respect to – every country has high expectations about how people will be treated, and the United States raises those issues consistently in our diplomacy.  And I’m sure that we and other countries will continue to do as much as we can to create reality in the words “fair, orderly, and equitable.”  Those are very important concepts to be applied to how people will be treated.

MODERATOR:  Thank you.  Just a reminder to our journalists online:  If you have a question, please feel free to raise your virtual hand.  We’ll take another question in the room.  Let’s go here – Leah.

QUESTION:  Hi, thank you so much, Secretary.

SECRETARY KERRY:  Can you identify yourself?

QUESTION:  Yeah.  Leah Griffith from Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese paper.

SECRETARY KERRY:  Thank you.

QUESTION:  So you and your Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua have worked together for many years and have a good relationship, which has helped the U.S.-China climate cooperation efforts.  Now that both of you are stepping down from your positions, do you expect the relationship with China to deteriorate?

SECRETARY KERRY:  No, I don’t, and I’m hopeful that it won’t.  We just had a very constructive, virtual meeting, Zoom meeting, with the new envoy and myself and John Podesta.  And we held this meeting, what, two days ago, I guess, so that I could sort of introduce John to their team and likewise, Liu Zhenhua – excuse me – Zhenmin could also introduce himself to us.  And we know him because he was at the United Nations and he’s been a vice minister and so forth through time.

What we hope is also that the working group that we put together is there sort of as an ongoing platform from which they can now really operationalize what Xie Zhenhua and I laid out regarding circular economy, regarding methane and non-CO2 gases, regarding coal and the retirement of coal.  So the agenda is already very clear.  And Xie Zhenhua and I have – just by happenstance to some degree, he’s affiliated with Tsinghua University.  I will be going back and doing some stuff with Yale University, where I had an initiative that was involved with some of the students and a group of fellows within that initiative who were doing research and work.

So we’re going to try to see if we can’t stay together, as citizens emeritus and do some constructive work that would be track two kind of effort.  And there’s plenty of track two stuff out there that gets done and can help diplomacy and help with relationships.  And Xie Zhenhua and I are genuinely good friends, and he is very experienced and very knowledgeable, and I hope we can work together to try to be helpful as we go forward.

MODERATOR:  Thank you.  Let’s go to the front.

QUESTION:  Thank you, Secretary.  Thank you, Secretary.  My name is Donghui Yu with China Review News Agency of Hong Kong.  I actually have a follow-up question.  And you have been the advocator for U.S.-China engagement for a long time, since you were senator or the secretary of state.  But now in the U.S., the mainstream thinking of the U.S.-China relations seems to be that the engagement was a failure or even a mistake.  So what do you think about this argument? And what lessons can we learn from the cooperation between the U.S. and China on climate change to deal with the overall relationship, which is quite competitive now – or even conflicting in some areas?  Thank you.

SECRETARY KERRY:  Well, sir, thank you for that question, and it’s a very important one.  And I look forward to sharing with you my thoughts on it.  There are a group of very legitimate issues between the United States and China, and we all know what they are.  And they’re well defined, ranging from questions about Hong Kong, about Taiwan, about Kim Jong-un, about nuclear weapons, about access to the marketplace, about intellectual property protection, about Uyghurs, about South China Sea – I mean, I’m just rattling these off right now, on the top of my head, so – and those are legitimate concerns.  They’ve been around for quite a period of time.  They have to be dealt with, because it’s very important that the rules of the road are defined.

I can remember when President Obama hosted President Xi here in Washington and the – I attended a dinner as secretary of state with Susan Rice and the president, just three of us, and three on the Chinese side.  And we – the president – both presidents defined very clearly but respectfully sort of what the interests were and how we needed to define them, and we were able to begin to get a feel for the depth of the problems that one particular issue presented versus another.  So that process was helpful to try to reduce tension and try to understand the roadmap for how we could deal with each other.

I think historically – and this goes back to my – some of the lessons I learned in Vietnam and in fighting in a war that was not what it had been purported to be.  Everybody was told, oh, this is the big international fight for – against communism, and if Vietnam falls then the rest of the region falls and so forth.  Not true.  It was not that.  It was a civil war, a fight locally for power and for something that Vietnam had been fighting for for a period of time with the French and long before.

So one of the lessons that I thought I learned – and I think it’s a valuable lesson – is when leaders have an opportunity to meet and to dialogue and to try to work through complicated issues between countries, hopefully you can avoid wars and you can build a policy that’s based on truth, not misinterpretation, not on superficial observations, but really based on clear definitions by leaders about interests and about the challenges to an orderly resolution of some of those issues.  So – and we don’t have the luxury of just parking a particular issue in the parking lot and pretending that you’re going to do everything else while that issue sits there unattended to.  That’s the way that you can have unintended consequences and mistakes get made.

So I am an advocate for engagement – not for the sake of just the public view of an engagement, but to try to understand exactly where the road is, and so that you don’t make misinterpretations and stumble into conflict that never should have taken place.  Now, it doesn’t mean you give up your principles; it doesn’t mean you give up your particular view on any issue.  Sometimes you’ll stay locked into that path.  But if you understand each other about it, you can begin to find ways to cooperate.

And what President Biden and President Xi agreed on was the notion that in climate, it’s not a bilateral issue, it’s a multilateral issue, and no country can solve this by itself.  China can’t go off and solve the climate problem; we can’t go off and solve the problem.  And even together we can’t solve the problem, although we have a huge influence on it.  But we can’t solve it without Russia, and Indonesia, and Brazil, and South Africa, and Australia, and Japan, and the rest of the developed world coming to the table, because 80 percent of all the emissions come from about 20 countries.  So we have to be realistic here.

Now, I think that by having the dialogue that we were able to have with China – it was based on mutual respect even though there are differences.  You have to approach it in a respectful way to try to have a dialogue that is going to be productive.  And so that’s where I think we are today, is with the ability to be productive.  And I think we’re better off.  Other people may judge it in different ways.

Now, have we resolved all those other issues?  No, but I think we’re – I know that Jake Sullivan has been meeting with his counterpart.  I think there’s a better understanding of how to not make a mistake and stumble into something you never intended to.  And hopefully in the days to come, that dialogue and that progress can continue.

MODERATOR:  Thank you.  Let’s take another question here, then we’ll go to this side.  Bingru.

QUESTION:  Thank you, Doris.  Thank you, Secretary Kerry.  Just a quick follow-up —

MODERATOR:  Can you say your name?

QUESTION:  Oh.  I’m Bingru Wang with Hong Kong Phoenix TV.  A quick follow-up on his question and your answer.  Ambassador Nicholas Burns has said that he’s not that optimistic about U.S.-China relationship in the near future.  Do you hold the same view, given you have the experience working with China for the past three years?  And I have one —

SECRETARY KERRY:  Well, Ambassador Burns is a very experienced and very capable diplomat.  And I don’t know where his starting point was for that particular analysis, but I have great respect for his analysis.  He may well not be – I didn’t sit here and tell you – stand here – I didn’t stand here and tell you in some sort of Pollyanna fashion that I think all is great and it’s going to be easy.  There is competition, and there will be competition.  What you need to do is make sure that you define the guardrails for that kind of competition and that you don’t allow it to spiral out of control and lead you where you never intended to go.

So I think Nick Burns would absolutely affirm what I just said, even as he says he may not be that optimistic about where things are going to change or go, and let’s see where we go.  That’s not my file, as we say, as I stand here today.  But – and I still believe that what we’ve been able to do on climate has been good for the world and good for our countries, and that we need continued joint efforts to deal with the climate crisis.

We also need to remember you don’t just shelve the effort to work on something because it’s hard.  And the fact is that what we’ve been able to do on the climate front I think has opened up some latitude to be able to have a good conversation about some of these other issues that we face.

QUESTION:  And given you have made so much progress in the past three years, Secretary Kerry, why don’t you stay in track one?

SECRETARY KERRY:  Well, my reason for – that’s a good question, and I appreciate it.  And the reason that I decided to move on to be involved, sort of as I say, on the ground, where you’re doing this hard work, is that in the UAE Consensus, we agreed – as I mentioned earlier – to transition away from fossil fuel; to do it in a fair, equitable manner; and to accelerate now, in this decade.  Well, we already agreed with China in our agreement that we would accelerate in this decade, and that was in Sunnylands meeting.  And we agreed at Dubai, at the COP, that we would accelerate in that decade.

So who’s going to accelerate?  We have to go out and make sure people are accelerating.  We have to make sure that we’re really on ground and engaged in that process.  And I think that the work now is more in the private sector, because the government has succeeded in setting the roadmap.  Now we have to follow the roadmap and implement, and I think it’s a better time for my energies to be able to put into that acceleration, that I can have more impact on the climate – the crisis itself.

MODERATOR:  Thank you.  Igor.

QUESTION:   Good morning.  Igor Naimushin, news agency Russia.  Thank you so much.  A couple of questions, if you’ll allow.  So what is the current level of relations between the U.S. and Russia on climate agenda?  Are there any points of contacts left?

And the second question, in February 2023, Russian ministry for economic development declared a review of a plan to decrease carbon emissions due to investment constraints led by sanctions.  In this regards, do you think that the Western sanctions are affecting global efforts to fight climate change and the shared commitments under the Paris Agreement?  Thank you so much.

SECRETARY KERRY:  No, I don’t.  Because I believe that Russia has the ability to be able to make enormous changes if it really wanted to.  I mean, if Russia has the ability to wage a war illegally and invade another country, they ought to be able to find the effort to be responsible on the climate issue.  And unfortunately, because of the actions that Russia took in an unprovoked, illegal war against another nation, we have not been engaged in discussions with Russia, sadly.  I say “sadly” because it’s a loss for the world not to be able to have Russia acting constructively on this issue.

But we need every country, including Russia – Russia’s one the largest emitters in the world.  If Russia wanted to show good faith, they could go out and announce what their reductions are going to be and make a greater effort to reduce emissions now.  Maybe that would open up the door for people to feel better about what Russia is choosing to do at this point in time.

MODERATOR:  Thank you.  Let’s go to Diyar.

QUESTION:  Thank you so much, Doris.

SECRETARY KERRY:  I’ll just say I’ve seen your representative, Edelgeriev, who has been at various meetings, but I haven’t seen him being super engaged with a lot of people because the other countries are angry enough that they’re unwilling to engage at this point in time.

QUESTION:  Yeah.  Thank you so much, Doris.  Thank you so much, Secretary, for doing this.

MODERATOR:  Can you say your name and media outlet?

QUESTION:  Of course.  My name is Diyar. I’m working for RUDAW Media Network, Kurdish TV.  Middle Eastern countries are heavily dependent on fossil fuels – coal, gas, and oil – which contributing about 75 percent of the greenhouse gas emission and also 90 percent of carbon dioxide emission.  And one of the countries in the Middle East is Iraq which is among the five countries in the world which affected by the climate change – we already witnessed the depreciation of the water and desertification.  So what engagements do you have with these countries, especially in Iraq and also the countries in the Middle East which heavily depending on the fossil fuels, on those —

SECRETARY KERRY:  Yeah.

QUESTION:  — resources that are affecting the global climate change?

SECRETARY KERRY:  Sure.  Thank you.

QUESTION:  And I have another question.

SECRETARY KERRY:  Good question.  Indeed, there are a group of countries in the Middle East that get a huge amount of income from oil and gas exploitation, and Iraq is one of them.  Iraq is also unfortunately one of the largest methane releasers, but – because of the flaring and the venting that takes place in Iraq.  So we’ve been working with Iraq very, very directly to try to help reduce the number of flaring and venting projects that are taking place.  There’s a lot of work yet to be done there.

But the real future here is going to be defined by the transition in these countries.  The words that were – that the UAE Consensus produced, which are really important, is transition away from fossil fuel, but transition away in a speed and a manner that allows you to try to keep 1.5 degrees alive, not just take the rest of the century to try to do it – but do it now, and do it as fast as we can, without upsetting economies and so forth.

Now, Saudi Arabia has made fundamental choices – just announced that they’re not going to invest more into production – right now, at least – because they’ve got enough to be able to meet demand, but also because they need to start to focus on other fuels.  Saudi Arabia may wind up being a major provider to Europe and other places of hydrogen – green hydrogen.  And they are building out massive solar fields and doing a huge amount of research on electrolyzers and new technologies to be able to meet the future.

There’s an oil minister I quoted in Dubai years ago in the 1970s – ’73, ’74.  There was a big oil crisis, supply shortage, and the minister from Saudi Arabia said famously the Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones, and the oil age is not going to end because we run out of oil.  And that’s sort of the course we’re now on, is instead of oil – or at least oil where you don’t capture the emissions; if you can capture the emissions, it’s a different equation to some degree.  But right now, that’s not happening, and so we need to transition, we need to come up with the alternatives – whether it’s nuclear or fusion, or green hydrogen – who knows?  But I know that Saudi Arabia, UAE, a bunch of countries are pursuing all of the options available to them, and that’s the future.

QUESTION:  Another question.  The global climate needs the global actions by all the countries, and we have two major wars now – one in Ukraine, and another one in Israel and – between Israel and Hamas.  Does these wars between Hamas and Israel, and also Ukraine and Russia, increase the vulnerability to the climate change?  What’s your assessment on that?

SECRETARY KERRY:  Yes, it does.  Well, it increases the vulnerability to ecological destruction.  I mean, when you have facilities that are being blown up, your ability to have clean water and clean air – all these kinds of things – disappear.  They’re blown up.  And obviously with all of the activities of war based on old assets – whether it’s airplanes, or trucks, or tanks, or whatever – there’s an awful lot of emissions that are being put up into the atmosphere.  So wars are not particularly – they’re not respectful, obviously, as we’ve seen, of human being – innocent human beings, and wars are not either – they’re not particularly concerned about or protective of the environment and their concerns.

So I know in Ukraine they’ve put a committee together that is working to look hard at all of the environmental implications of the war, and sort of set up a post-war plan for how they can undo some of the damage and make up for lost time.  And it’s quite unusual to have people actually in the midst of a war, where they’re defending themselves and their existence, to be thinking about the future in that way, but that’s what they’re doing.

MODERATOR:  Thank you.  We have time for just a few more questions.  Let’s go here and then Jahanzaib.

QUESTION:  Hello.  I am Bo Chen Han from the South China Morning Post.  So you said you’re interested in unlocking private sector climate finance in your life after government.  What role do you see China’s business sector playing in the global climate investment?  And are you concerned that U.S. restrictions on Chinese business and investment might conflict with these goals?

SECRETARY KERRY:  Well, when you say, “are you concerned,” it’s a reality that sanctions on solar panels or wind turbines are going to reduce the number of turbines being sold.  So there’s a clear impact, but measured against what Congress decided they wanted to say through that measure.  They made a decision that on balance that it’s more important to send the message about it.  That’s just where they are.

The challenge of China in terms of living up to the best possibilities of what we want to achieve in this decade, and particularly by 2050, China’s got to be a partner in that.  And we are interdependent with respect to this simply because emissions don’t go up into the atmosphere with a big China flag following it, or a U.S. flag.  Emissions are apolitical.  They don’t have a China or U.S. marking.  They don’t have a liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican – they just go up and do the damage.

And since China represents 30 percent of all the emissions in the world and the United States is now at 10 percent and going down – we may have even hit 9 – we had a 4 percent reduction in emissions this last month, even while we have 2.5 percent growth in our economy.  So you can grow your economy without negative impact on emissions.  But we need more countries stepping up.  Now, as I said earlier, China is producing and deploying more renewables than all the rest of the world put together, and that means that automatically China is going to reduce some of the demand that it actually light up those coal-fired power plants.

And our hope is that coal will soon be seeing a big reduction, because the largest impact on human beings, negative impact from air quality, comes from the burning of coal where they’re not capturing the emissions.  And the particulates of the coal now fall in rainfall into the ocean, and they raise the acidity of the ocean, and they are changing dramatically the chemistry of the ocean more than it has been changed in millions of years.  This has impact on coral reefs, on fisheries, on fish stocks, on the ocean, on what species inhabit what part of the ocean.  Things are changing very dramatically in the oceans.  And we have a major oceans conference hosted by Greece on April 15th and 16th this year, where these kinds of issues are going to be discussed, and they’re very important.

MODERATOR:  Thank you.  Jahanzaib.

QUESTION:  Thank you so much, sir.  This is Jahanzaib Ali from ARY News, Pakistan.  The 2022 floods in Pakistan created some $30 billion of damages.  The U.S. has given some $200 million in bilateral aid for flood recovery, a small fraction of what is needed, but the U.S. also opposes the Loss and Damage Fund created in 2022 to help countries like Pakistan.  Why that opposition?  Thank you.

SECRETARY KERRY:  Let me make this as clear as I possibly can, because I personally was either involved in or made some key decisions regarding this.  The United States has never opposed the Loss and Damage Fund.  What it has opposed is the idea that it would be linked through liability and compensation, but we have always supported the idea of helping people who are most impacted and most vulnerable because of the climate crisis.

So in fact, that’s part of what President Biden put together with his $12 billion PREPARE program that I cited.  But the United States embraced the Loss and Damage approach when it was proposed in Sharm El-Sheikh.  I personally made some of those decisions.  As you may recall, it was originally proposed in Sharm El-Sheikh to be a two-year process.  First year would be sort of start – create it, and then go to the next COP and then work on how you stand it up and what you do.  I said no, it’s urgent enough that we should do it in one year, and we should come out of Sharm El-Sheikh and make sure we do it in the UAE, and that’s exactly what we did.

And we worked on it all summer long at five different meetings.  The fifth was one that we asked for because we weren’t finished; they weren’t able to come to agreement.  And the COP president, Dr. Sultan Al Jaber, called a fifth meeting, and he and others helped a lot, Europeans helped – there are plenty of people who came to the table – and we worked in good faith so that we were able to pass the proposal unanimous – by unanimous consent, without any opposition, on the floor of the plenary the first day of the COP.  That’s what happened.  And I’m very pleased and proud to tell you the United States was at the table pushing forward, trying to get that done.  And we could have blocked it anytime if we truly opposed it; we did not.

So you know what – and where this idea that comes from that we were opposed to it comes from the fact that we would say to people if you have this created with some sort of legal liability so there are to be lawsuits all over the world, you’re never going to get money; you’re – it’s never going to work.  And what we needed to do was find a common ground where we could all come together and have something that could work.  Now, what we’re going to have is not something that’s loss and damage; it’s an impact.  Go look at the decision.  It’s defined as an impact fund to deal with the effects of the climate crisis on the most vulnerable countries, which effectively is obviously loss and damage.

But what we’re doing is trying to make this something that can actually happen.  And we put 17,500,000 in it, which I know is a small amount compared to the 100 million that a couple people put in.  But that’s the only money we had appropriated.  We work in a way that if Congress doesn’t appropriate it, we can’t put the money in.  So we put the money in that we had available with the promise that that’s just money to help set up the fund, not to actually fund the fund.  And that’s why I said earlier Baku will be a place where that discussion is sure to continue and take place.

MODERATOR:  I’m afraid we’re out of time for questions.  I will turn it back to Mr. Kerry for closing remarks.

SECRETARY KERRY:  No, I’m good.  I’m – thank you all very much for your interest and look forward to seeing you along the trail.  I will be at the COP; I will be at the oceans conference.  I’ve talked to President Aliyev and talked about some of things we can help with, and as a private citizen I still expect to be deeply involved.  Thank you all.

MODERATOR:  Thank you all for joining us.  And thank you to Mr. Kerry for briefing.  This concludes today’s briefing.