Brisbane Times

‘'Stop us in our tracks’: Biden’s new climate chief John Kerry invokes Australian bushfires

By Bevan Shields and Matthew Knott
January 28, 2021

London: US President Joe Biden’s climate tsar has invoked last summer’s Australian bushfire crisis as evidence the world “can’t afford to lose any longer” and must urgently slash carbon emissions.

John Kerry, a former US secretary of state under Barack Obama, is rallying world leaders to bring more ambitious policies to a crunch summit in Glasgow later this year through his role as Biden’s international climate envoy.

His appointment and a much more aggressive approach to global warming by the Biden-led White House has put fresh pressure on the Morrison government to commit to net zero emissions by 2050.

Joe Biden’s choice of former secretary of state John Kerry

 as his climate envoy underscores the US President’s determination

 to tackle climate change. CREDIT:AP

The Biden administration made climate change its focus on Thursday AEDT, announcing a series of new executive orders designed to elevate climate “as an essential element of US foreign policy and national security”.

The White House announced it was suspending all oil and gas leases on federal land, would begin transforming the government’s vast fleet of cars and trucks into electric vehicles and propose legislation to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies.

Biden will host a leaders’ climate summit on Earth Day, April 22, in a bid to create momentum before the Glasgow event in November.

‘We need to be bold’: US President Joe Biden.CREDIT:AP

“We’ve waited too long to deal with this climate crisis,” Biden said at a White House signing ceremony.

“This is not a time for small measures. We need to be bold.”


RELATED ARTICLE


Biden's White House
US under Biden to test Morrison government's do-little climate stance

Biden has also created a new office of domestic climate policy to co-ordinate climate policy across key government agencies.

In his first appearance at the White House briefing room, Kerry said: “The stakes on climate change just simply couldn’t be any higher than they are right now [...] This is an issue where failure, literally, is not an option.”

Speaking earlier at the World Economic Forum, Kerry said he had read an article over Christmas “that ought to stop every single one of us in our tracks”.

Headlined “Watching Earth Burn”, the story by New York Times writer Michael Benson pieced together satellite images of the Australian bushfire emergency.

“You could see huge plumes of smoke when you saw these pictures of Australia’s fires with, and I quote Michael, ‘flame vortexes spiralling 200 feet into the air’ passing New Zealand and stretching thousands of miles into the cobalt Pacific,” Kerry said.

He continued to quote details in Benson’s article, including the razing of an estimated 46 million acres, loss of dozens of lives, destruction of nearly 6000 buildings and potential extinction of some species.

“Benson summed it up,” Kerry said. “With shocking iconographic precision, that unfurling banner of smoke said: The war has started. We’re losing.”


Prime Minister Scott Morrison has pledged to work closely with the US President-Elect Joe Biden on key issues such as climate change.

Kerry did not directly criticise Australia’s climate change policies but earlier this week said he would push the world’s largest emitters to sign up to deeper cuts.

Australia has a goal of cutting emissions by 26-28 per cent by 2030. It has not signed up to achieving net zero emissions by 2050 but Morrison’s language has shifted recently and many Liberal MPs believe he will take the pledge at the Glasgow summit.

“So we are here now, at this moment, not just because we understand the urgency or the moral imperative, we’re here because we know we can’t afford to lose any longer and action is the one moral, economic and scientific imperative worth contemplating,” Kerry said.

He emphasised the need to limit temperature rises to 1.5 degrees but warned the world was on track to hit 4.1 or 4.5 degrees of warming. The Glasgow meeting was “the last best chance” to arrest the trajectory, Kerry said.

“But even if we did everything that was promised in Paris, folks, temperatures are going to rise to 3.7 degrees [of warming]. And that’s just because the conglomeration of all the things people were willing to do didn’t add up to what we need to do.”

Kerry estimated the world had to phase out coal five times faster than current rates, ramp up renewable energy six times faster and transition to electric vehicles 22 times faster.

RELATED ARTICLE

Australia Day
Use Biden agenda to commit to net zero: Malcolm Turnbull

In a panel discussion after Kerry’s speech, Shell CEO Ben van Beurden said companies knew they would have to reduce the supply of oil, gas and coal but said a careful transition was needed.

Kerry responded: “The problem with gas is if we build out a huge infrastructure for gas now and continue to use it as the bridge fuel when we haven’t really exhausted the other possibilities, we’re going to be stuck with stranded assets in 10, 20, 30 years.

“And gas is primarily methane. The fact is methane is 20 times [more] damaging, if not more, than fossil fuels.”

His views on gas are significant because the Morrison government has flagged the resource as a transition fuel for the coming decades.

Kerry also criticised China’s pledge to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060 when other countries have signed up to a 2050 target.

“China has said they’re gonna do something by 2060 but we don’t have a clue really, yet, about how they’re going to get there. I hope we can work with China. I hope we can get China to share a sense of how we get there sooner than 2060.”

At his later White House briefing room appearance, Kerry said the Biden administration would not trade away a tough stance on the South China Sea or intellectual property theft in order to co-operate with China on climate.

The statement announcing Biden’s executive order states that “both significant short-term global emission reductions and net zero global emissions by mid-century – or before – are required to avoid setting the world on a dangerous, potentially catastrophic, climate trajectory”.




Bevan Shields  is the Europe correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.


Matthew Knott is North America correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.