U.S. climate czar John Kerry asserted this weekend that even if the Democrats lose the White House, “nobody can stop” the energy transition that is underway.
In an interview with Singaporean television, Kerry was asked if the 2024 elections could throw a wrench in current U.S. climate policy.
“Nobody can stop, I don’t believe any politician can stop what is happening now,” Kerry replied. “This transition is much bigger than any one party in the country. People are moving because the science is telling us we have to move in this direction.”
“It’s not political; it’s not ideological,” he insisted. “It’s about the air people breathe. It’s about pollution going up into the air. About the impact of countries, of their farming, of their living conditions, of their children, of disease.”
“Those things should motivate everybody to be helping to make this transition happen,” he said.
Life on the planet “is being hugely disrupted as a result of the warming taking place because of how we burn fossil fuel,” he asserted. “And if we don’t capture the emissions, we can’t win the battle.”
File/John Kerry plays cards on board his private jet enroute to Albuquerque, New Mexico from Minneapolis on May 4, 2004. (Photo by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)
“The key is, we have to capture the emissions, and if we capture the emissions, it will phase out because people are going to move to renewables and other things over time and I think that’s part of the transition,” he said.
“It is green hydrogen, or blue, or pink, whatever color it’s going to be, hydrogen is going to be part of the future,” he added.
Kerry was in Singapore for the Bloomberg New Economy Forum and was interviewed by Julie Yoo for Channel News Asia (CNA).
Regarding the UK’s scaling back on its net zero ambitions, Kerry said:
It tells me that some people are being swayed by money, and that they’re not following through on some of their promises because of pressure from shareholders, pressure from external elements, it’s problem.
“We can’t go backwards, we cannot allow the Paris agreement to be walked backwards, and that will be one of the tests of the COP, of its success,” he warned.
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial Tuesday titled “The Global Toll of Biden’s Green Enthusiasm,” in which Walter Russell Mead argues that the forced energy shift sought by the Biden administration “will drive inflation and affect living standards around the world.”
“Under President Biden, American economic policy is morphing into a toxic combination of protectionism and green activism guaranteed to slow growth and create global friction,” Mead contends.
The reason for this, he notes, is that the green transition “requires a massive shift of investment away from creating new goods and services toward replacing our existing energy and transport systems with systems that duplicate capabilities we already have,” a formula that will drive inflation upward.