McKibben Discusses The Future With John Kerry As He Moves On

“There’s a lack of knowledge, a lack of due diligence, a lack of basic education on the issue of climate,” John Kerry says.Photograph by Alain Jocard / AFP / Getty

With a transition this important, and especially when McKibben has a conversation like this one it is worth two posts in a row:

John Kerry Thinks We’re at a Critical Moment on Climate Change

As he steps down from office, the first Presidential envoy on the climate says that we have made progress, but we’re not moving fast enough.

He’s been perhaps most closely involved in negotiations with the Chinese government, in particular with his longtime interlocutor Xie Zhenhua, who retired in December at the age of seventy-four. One of Xie’s last encounters with Kerry came last December at the cop28 climate talks in Dubai, where Xie’s eight-year-old grandson presented Kerry with a card for his eightieth birthday. Now Kerry, too, is leaving his post—eager, he says, to escape the constraints of the Hatch Act, which prevents federal employees from political engagement.

“I am stepping down to put focus on implementing what we accomplished in Dubai, which will require J.B. getting re-elected but also the deployment of massive clean energy and vast sums of investment to win this fight. I intend to work globally to push the private sector,” he wrote me, as we were setting up the exit interview that follows, which was conducted a couple of weeks before he left his office, and which has been edited and condensed. We began, of course, by talking about the weather. I noted that Vermont, where I live, was coming through the warmest winter in its recorded history.

kerry: I was just talking to some folks about that. Now the ponds don’t freeze. There’s no black ice. There’s very little snow. We’ve got seven hundred days in Boston without more than [four] inches of the stuff.

That leads obviously into the first important question. You’ve been doing this a very long time. You were there when the Paris accords were signed, and every year since, except for the depths of covid, the world has produced more greenhouse gases, the temperature keeps going up. Is there reason to think that that momentum is about to break? Or has this been a kind of exercise in futility?

I don’t think it’s an exercise in futility. But neither is it an exercise of victory or near-victory at the moment, though we have made progress. When I took over the job, on January 20th of 2021, we were headed to [a global temperature increase of] four degrees [Celsius]. Nothing very much was happening. The United States—we’d pulled out, under Donald Trump, from the Paris agreement. We had no money in the budget. And I didn’t have an office. We met at a hotel on January 20th of 2021…