For Barack Obama, stopping the inexorable advance of global warming felt like an almost personal mission.
Despite tangible accomplishments—bringing China to the table during the Paris climate change conference or advancing clean air technology here in the U.S., the president and his team still question if their efforts—if the world’s efforts—will be enough to turn back the tide and save the planet.
Well, it’s a matter of life and death. I mean it’s very simple—it really is. This is the first president [who] recognizes that this is a generational moral responsibility, that we will be judged on whether or not we heeded the evidence and responded.
During the campaign, this was an issue that [the president] was focused on and intellectually invested in understanding. He has seen what has happened over the last several years, which is that the science continues to tell us that…the pace of this problem is significantly outstripping the steps the world is taking to try to address it. I think that has motivated him.
My friend and colleague in the United States Senate, Pat Moynihan, from New York, had a great saying: “Everybody’s entitled to their own opinion but you’re not entitled to your own facts.” Report after report has documented how the science works.
The president led an energy revolution in many ways, using the Recovery Act to seed renewable energy, using his leverage with the auto industry to raise fuel efficiency standards in a historic way, using his authority through the EPA to ratchet down greenhouse gases, bringing the world together around the Paris Climate Change Agreement.
In December of 2009, in Copenhagen, more than 100 world leaders, including Barack Obama, met to try to forge an agreement to help heal the planet. Despite high hopes, the conference was marred by discord, and the non-binding resolution that emerged has been widely seen as anemic, at best. But looking back at Denmark, the president and his team now say the conference may have planted the seeds that led to more fruitful advances years down the line.
At the end of 2009, when the president and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went to the Copenhagen climate talks, they showed up in a chaotic environment. There was no semblance of order. It was so bad that [they] had to run around the convention hall to find the Chinese and the Indians and the Brazilians, the delegations that had holed up in a meeting room to try to avoid the president. He had to literally bust in on the meeting, he and Secretary Clinton, to sit down to say, “Look, we’ve got to find some path forward.”
Copenhagen crashed, and it crashed largely because China and the G77 countries [a group of developing countries formed in 1964], felt there was no methodology on the table that recognized their challenges. That the developed world was dumping responsibility on them. And there was this great divide. When the president made me his secretary of state, it was clear to me that if we were going to move forward, we had to have China.
Copenhagen is largely written off as a failure, but the seeds of progress were planted in the president and Secretary Clinton’s engagement there. What came out of that failed negotiation was a sense that if we were going to build a new global coalition to fight climate change, it was going to have to look and feel different than [what] we had been doing.
For decades, this had been fought as two teams: developed and developing countries. And the U.S. and China were captains of the teams and they came and butted heads. And the developing countries said, “It’s on you guys to combat climate change and…that just wasn’t going to work. And that was what was clear out of Copenhagen. If we were going to change this, we were going to have to mount a new global effort to get there.
One of Kerry’s first major trips as secretary of state was to go to China, in April of 2013. On the table: hammering out the first steps of a new partnership between that country and the U.S. to work together to beat back climate change.
Within about a month and a half of being secretary, I went to China. We got them to agree to create a working group with a view to trying to get in a place where our two presidents, President Xi and President Obama, could stand up before the world and say, “Here we are, China and the United States. [We] disagreed to the point of failure in Copenhagen; now we’re agreeing we have to move forward.” That was a sea change, dramatic, monumental moment of transformation on this issue. And when President Xi and President Obama announced our joint intended reduction levels, every other country knew, “Wow, something serious is happening.”
Despite the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in April of 2010, legislation to put a cap on carbon emissions, championed by the president and then-Senator John Kerry, died on the vine in an increasingly partisan Senate. Obama was determined to do better his second term, with or without the help of Congress.
First and foremost, we needed to move the United States from a laggard on this issue to a leader domestically. The president tried on the cap and trade front and failed the first term. [He] decided in the second term we were going to move away from Congress and use the tools we could domestically. We launched a climate action plan in 2013 and used tools across our economy and our industry to try to increase fuel economy of vehicles, increase energy efficiency of our buildings and factories, and take carbon pollution out of the power sector with the Clean Power Plan. That effort helped change the perception of the U.S. as actually leading, and putting our money where our mouth is.
The second big piece was the U.S.- China joint statement in 2014, where the president and his team worked behind the scenes with the Chinese to come to an announcement where you had the two captains of the opposing teams standing together and saying, “We’re going to change the playing field. We’re going to jointly announce ambitious climate targets. There is not a top-down effort to dictate what we will do but we’re both going to do something.” That helped unlock a process of two years of intense diplomacy with countries around the world, to try to pull those countries forward to support a global coalition to Paris.
In the months and days leading up to the monumental United Nations conference on climate change, to be held in Paris at the end of 2015, Secretary of State Kerry traveled the globe, priming attendees beforehand, keen to avoid another rehash of the failure in Copenhagen.
We were bringing countries to the table, teeing up Paris. And when the time to go to Paris came, I spent 10 [or more] days negotiating every day, working with countries, bringing India, bringing Korea, Japan, other countries to the table so we could work through the differences and get an agreement. And all the leaders came on the first day. That was a big debate: Do they come the first day [or] at the end? The decision was made to come the first day, and it set it into motion and was very dramatic, with all of these leaders there saying, “We have to get this done.” It created an energy that was essential to the negotiations.
The president flew over to Paris on the first day, spoke to the conference and then had meetings with key countries: the Chinese, the Indians, trying to say, “Look, our negotiators are going to be here for the next 10 days. But can we try to find some agreement that, when push comes to shove and things get tough, we look each other in the eye and say, ‘Okay, now is the time when our set of countries is going to come together and really solve this.’” It wasn’t easy. Part of the way we managed…that second week, when we were all in Paris in negotiating rooms, [was that] every evening or every morning, depending on the complicated time zones, [the president was] making calls [from Washington] to the Brazilians, or the Indians, or, ultimately, the Chinese. He had a couple of very important interactions [by phone], particularly with President Xi of China, near the end of the conference, where that sense of understanding was cashed in to say, “Okay, now’s the time. We need to tell our negotiators, we need to come together, we need to lock it down. Whatever small details they can’t agree on, it’s time to put them to bed.”
There’s nothing as exciting—and nerve wracking—as a crucial game going into overtime on the last day of the playoffs. That was essentially the situation on the final afternoon of the Paris Conference, on December 12, 2015. The issue at stake: a matter of semantics, that happened to mean everything.
The thing that was most harrowing in those last couple of days—we are negotiating on the ground with the president talking to heads of state, [we] had found landing zones on all of the key issues, the financial component, transparency, and thought, “Okay, maybe we’ve landed here. Maybe this will finally work.” The conference was supposed to end on Friday but it didn’t, so we woke up on Saturday morning and the French, as the conveners, were going to release a final text with the idea that this was the take-it-or-leave-it text. And we would all agree, or not, later in the day on Saturday.
So we woke up, [and] we thought we were in the right place. We got a text around noon. We came back to the room with the team running through the text. And Secretary Kerry, Todd Stern [U.S. special envoy for climate change] and I were there, getting input—Does everything look okay? All of the sudden, somebody came in and said, “We’ve got a problem.” One of the sentences that we had understood would say, “the parties should do the following things” said “the parties shall do the following things.” That distinction, between should and shall, had very significant legal consequences. And we had all agreed that it was going to say should and not shall. So we had a harrowing half an hour, 45 minutes, where we tried to understand what was going on. We connected with the French and confirmed that this was a mistake, that it was supposed to reflect what we had all agreed and that they were going to find a way to fix it. But for a period there…all of our hearts dropped. We thought that maybe we were going to lose this very delicately put together effort.
I can tell you it was a very dramatic moment when the agreement was gaveled into effect after all these years of effort—186 countries had signed up, each with their own plan to reduce emissions. And we’re on our plan. We’re ahead of schedule. We’re actually meeting every target we’ve set.
In August of 2015, the president announced his Clean Power Plan, in an effort to reduce carbon pollution from the power sector in the United States.
It’s the single biggest thing any president has ever done to try to combat climate change. It was years in the making and it reflected the core of the president’s effort to combat this existential threat. So we’re walking over to the East Room for him to make this announcement. [It’s] a big opportunity, really exciting, and the president pulls out an article from Science that he had been reading the night before, about the fact that the climate crisis was getting worse. And he said, “You know, this is really getting to me. We’re not doing enough. We’re not moving fast enough.” And he was clearly affected by it. And when we walked over to the East Room and met up with Gina McCarthy, the EPA administrator, he didn’t say, “Congratulations. This is really exciting. I’m really glad we got to this.” Instead, he pulled Gina over and said, “Have you seen this article? You’ve got to read this article. You’ve got to tell me what you think of it and we’ve got to figure out what more we can do.” Up until he walked on stage he was focused on the fact that we weren’t doing enough.
No president has set aside as many square kilometers of ocean for marine preserves. No president has ever before set aside as much land for parks and for preservation. No president has ever been as forward leaning on protecting the environment, whether the shift from fossil fuels to the National Climate Action Plan [enacted in 2013 to cut carbon pollution], to the power plant regulations to the automobile and truck standards, to efficiency standards.
The way the president thinks about the need for us to tackle [this issue] is different from any other issue I’ve worked with him on. The way he describes it is, “Look, on education reform or job creation, [or] the economy…progress is frustrating. It’s too slow, it’s halting, but you can see that we’re moving in a positive direction. With climate change, that’s not true. Things are getting worse and the pace of that is increasing to the degree that we actually [will] face a point in time—hopefully, we have not already gotten there—where…there is such a thing as being too late. And we may have already reached that time but if we haven’t, we need to do everything we can to get ahead of this problem because it is a unique threat.” He talks about this issue and he works with us on this issue with a degree of urgency that is infectious. I think that gives all of us the ability to work, whether with a particular industry or internationally, with that sense that this is something the president is ready to fight for.
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