John Kerry, whom President Joe Biden appointed as the United States special presidential envoy for climate, said in an interview with the BBC on Wednesday that only nine years remain to save the planet from so-called manmade climate change.
Kerry was asked about the United Nation’s COP26 conference in Glasgow, Scotland, scheduled for November.
“Glasgow will be extremely important,” Kerry said. “In fact, I would say that in my judgment, it is the last best chance the world has to come together in order to do the things we need to do to avoid the worst consequences of the climate crisis.”
“Three years ago, we were told we have 12 years to avoid those consequences,” Kerry said. “Three of those years were lost because we had Donald Trump, who didn’t believe in any of it. And now we have nine years left to try to do what science is telling us we need to do.”
“But at a White House news conference on Wednesday, Mr. Kerry acknowledged the crisis would not be fixed even if the US reduced its emissions to zero,” the BBC reported, and added inaccurately that former President Donald Trump claimed to gain U.S. energy independence under his leadership, which, in fact, he did.
“[Mr Biden] knows Paris alone is not enough,” Kerry said. “Not when almost 90 percent of all of the planet’s global emissions come from outside of U.S. borders.”
“We could go to zero tomorrow and the problem isn’t solved,” Kerry said.
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