by John Kerry
Then it was my turn.
“I listened to my colleague from Russia,” I began. “He said that nobody should have any preconditions to come to the table. . . . How can people go sit at a table with a regime that bombs hospitals and drops chlorine gas again and again and again and again and again and again, and acts with impunity? Are you supposed to sit there and have happy talk in Geneva . . . when you’ve signed up to a cease-fire and you don’t adhere to it?”
I wanted the talks to continue more than anyone, but I couldn’t let Russia get away with this Orwellian doublespeak.
“Just think about what happened in the last couple of days,” I argued. “President Putin’s press secretary . . . claims that the attack on the humanitarian convoy was somehow a necessary response to an alleged offensive by al-Nusra elsewhere in the country. That’s the first claim. Then a Russian ambassador said that Russian and Syrian forces were not bombing the area, but they were targeting Khan Tuman. Then we heard a completely different story. The defense ministry said that the aid convoy had been accompanied by militants in a pickup truck with a mortar. We’ve seen no evidence of that. But that, in any case, would not justify a violation of the cessation of hostilities. . . . Then the defense ministry switched completely, and it denied Russia’s involvement. It said, according to spokesman Igor Konashenkov, ‘Neither Russia nor Syria conducted air strikes on the UN humanitarian convoy in the southwestern outskirts of Aleppo.’
“Then Konashenkov went further and he said the damage to the convoy was the direct result of the cargo catching fire. The trucks and the food and the medicine just spontaneously combusted. Anybody here believe that?”
As I walked out of the Security Council chamber, I felt for the first time that we had arrived at the end of the road. If the Russians were going to speak from a script of alternative facts, negotiation had gone from improbable to impossible.
In November, after Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election, I tried to make one last attempt to achieve some measure of progress, even if it was incremental. Trump had said Assad deserved an A for leadership, so I figured our Gulf partners might have added incentive to be cooperative in the last months of the Obama administration. More than that, we had all worked effectively on a number of imperfect cease-fires that had saved some lives, and we had delivered humanitarian assistance to places that had received none in four years. Small steps were still steps. One life saved was still one less tragedy in a cascade of horror. I hosted my counterparts from Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Iraq and Egypt in Lausanne. All we could do was negotiate the evacuation and surrender of Aleppo to the regime. I’ve never had such a sinking sense of futility.
Diplomacy to save Syria was dead for our administration, and the wounds of Syria remained open.
I think every day about how we might have closed them and how the world might close them still.
CHAPTER 20
Protecting the Planet
ONE BY ONE the sleek BMW police motorcycles escorted motorcade after motorcade to a precisely designated place at the gate to the exhibition hall at Le Bourget Airport, not far from the exact spot where Charles Lindbergh had touched down in the Spirit of St. Louis after his epic transatlantic flight in 1927. Black limousine after black limousine then broke away from the motorcade to roll up to a grand entrance with a huge red carpet, where the leaders of the world, one after the other, stepped out of their cars to be formally greeted by President François Hollande of France. A bank of cameras focused on each arrival as the leaders turned to pose for photographs, a steady, repetitive moment in the sun to satisfy each home audience and history.
President Obama arrived in the oversized, overweight limo called “the beast.” I suppose that arriving at the Conference of the Parties (COP) for the Global Climate Change meeting in Paris, we might have thought twice about rolling up in a gas-guzzling behemoth that allegedly gets 3.7 miles to the gallon, but the Secret Service doesn’t factor climate or messaging into presidential security. The president stepped onto the red carpet while the rest of us went around the official greeting party.
One after the other, the cavalcade continued. President Xi of China. Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India. President Putin of Russia. King Abdullah of Jordan. Presidents, prime ministers, kings and princes—150 strong had all come to Paris because the world appeared to be finally galvanizing around the urgency of addressing climate change. I can’t think of any other meeting or event, other than the UN General Assembly, that commanded such attendance, and unlike the UNGA in New York, this was all happening at the same time, all on the same day, compressed within a few hours. It was an extraordinary assemblage. It was also a moment of solidarity with France. Just a couple of weeks earlier, homegrown Islamic extremists had blown themselves up and unleashed torrents of gunfire inside a Paris concert hall, at the soccer stadium and outside bars and restaurants, murdering 130 innocent people and wounding hundreds more. Worries about security forced cancellation of a long-planned march for the planet. What a startling juxtaposition: Paris paralyzed by those who wanted to destroy civilization itself, while hundreds of leaders were gathering to try to save it from a different existential threat.
Inside the exhibition hall, heads of state posed together for what is known as the “family photo,” all standing dutifully next to one another on a dais, posing for a class picture. They greeted each other like old friends whether they had met before or hated each other. Even Bibi Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas shook hands for the first time in five years. Some issues are so important that even enemies are able to work in common cause.
Then, in another departure from the usual protocol of such a meeting, everyone milled around and slowly shuffled their way through a tent corridor into the plenary chamber, which was a large hard-frame tent set up for the conference. It was a rare moment of egalitarian opportunity to corral one leader or another, whether they wanted to talk or not. I chuckled watching the body language of some leaders as they were importuned unexpectedly and others expansively holding forth, obviously enjoying the conversation. None of us had ever seen such an assemblage of world leaders sauntering through a hallway like high school kids moving from one class to another.
This was the formal opening of the Twenty-First Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The first day would be consumed by heads of state speeches to the plenary. One by one, they described their country’s particular concerns and urged the conference to act before it was too late.
The road to this meeting was not as easy as the vast assemblage seemed to suggest. For many of the attendees, there were still tricky issues to be resolved. Less developed nations wanted more clean energy technology donated to their impoverished countries, particularly since they were barely contributing to the problem. Island nations wanted to be saved from disappearing beneath a rising ocean. Oil-producing countries wanted to protect their economic life source as they transitioned to a new economy. Every region had its own survival instincts. And, of course, the twenty major polluting nations bearing responsibility for 80 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions faced huge pressure from powerful economic interests.
I thought back to a night in the weeks before I was confirmed as secretary. I was enjoying a dinner with my Senate chief of staff, at Las Placitas, a hole-in-the-wall Salvadoran restaurant on Capitol Hill. He would join me as my chief of staff at the State Department. We were talking through the workload and agenda while enjoying terrific guacamole, salsa and margaritas, a pleasant way to plan the future.
Former secretary James Baker had previously shared with me how important it was to set two or three top priorities and never lose sight of them. I pulled out my Senate legal pad and made the short list and the long list. In 2013, there were the obvious, enduring challenges for any American secretary of state: nuclear weapons, war, terrorism, religious extremism. But I wanted to elevate another priority, just as urgent and existential, yet woefully under-resource
d at the State Department and astonishingly not accepted in all quarters as a crisis at all. I wanted to do for the environment what my predecessor, Hillary Clinton, had done for global women’s issues. Why was I so focused on the environment? Quite simply, because even as a person of faith, I believe in science, and after a quarter century working on the issue, I knew as a matter of scientific fact that climate change is an existential threat. There is no Planet B.
It is nothing less than extraordinary to me that in the United States, without evidence, without factual, scientific inquiry, charlatans get away with arguing that climate change is not hugely aggravated by man-made choices. It is beyond Orwellian, beyond the old disinformation of the Cold War. It is even more disturbing that the current president of the United States has eagerly assumed the role of cheerleader in chief for capricious choices that will cost lives and treasure.
The profound environmental concern I brought to public life came directly from my mother’s choices and environmentalist Rachel Carson’s inspiration. My mother never shoved the environment at any of us, but her example was powerful and sublime at the same time. At Potomac School, she was a principal mover in the creation of the nature walk where we buried my Cairn terrier, Sandy. She could identify countless birds and even rose early sometimes to go bird-watching. She was one of the original recyclers. She served on the health committee of her local community. She taught us to respect our surroundings, pick up trash, not pollute. She was my early indoctrination in the meaning of an ecosystem.
Of course at Naushon Island we were surrounded by a natural habitat that, from my earliest years, required respect, even reverence. Because the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution was based just across from the island, we would not only visit and be mesmerized by Marine species in tanks and stories of exploration, but we would often bump into researchers gathering specimens off the shores of the island. My mother was a huge Jacques Cousteau fan. Watching the Cousteau specials on TV was regular fare.
When Silent Spring was published in 1962, my freshman year at Yale, Rachel Carson instilled in me and a whole generation a sense of moral urgency. Her story of corporate connivance and government complicity in hiding the killer impacts of pesticides on humans was an eye-opener at the time. We hadn’t yet grown so cynical that we expected either corporations or government to mislead the consumer. It was a rude awakening to what we now have come to expect as just the way it is. The cigarette companies hid the evidence that smoking gives you cancer; the Woburn dump hid the leaching that could give people cancer; the coal companies denied any responsibility for acid rain—the examples are plentiful. Because of Rachel Carson sounding the alarm, I was privileged to be involved in the takeoff of the modern environmental movement.
Now, in 2013, forty-three years after the first Earth Day, as well as my many efforts on oceans, fisheries, acid rain and climate legislation in the Senate, I was excited that as secretary of state I could represent a president and administration deeply committed to reaching a global agreement on climate change at the 2015 COP in Paris.
To get there, I was convinced the essential first step was finding a way to cooperate with China. Regrettably, China and the United States had been adversaries on this issue for decades. It was time to change the dynamic. I shared this thought with President Obama during our first meeting after he nominated me. He was enthusiastic. He had his own hopes for what we could do on climate change in his second term, but we both knew how tough it would be.
Four years before, in December 2009, I attended the UN climate negotiations in Copenhagen. The goal of the conference was to reach a global agreement on each nation’s reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. I had been to many of these conferences since the 1992 Rio conference. In Copenhagen, there was a new optimism about the United States’ engagement. But optimism wasn’t an outcome. While President Obama’s passion for climate action was a welcome change, there were tough issues to work through. First and foremost was the bifurcation of countries into “developed” and “developing” nations.
One of the principal reasons the 1997 Kyoto Protocol had failed is that it required much more from the United States and other developed nations and essentially nothing from developing countries, including major emitters like China and India. At the time, China was already the world’s number two polluter. Even though China promised it would undertake serious efforts, not signing up for a measurable—if not enforceable—reduction schedule simply wouldn’t do. We didn’t need all countries to take the exact same steps, but we certainly needed all countries to be taking some action toward a low-carbon future.
Another major hurdle was transparency. There was a huge trust deficit. Most delegates were not comfortable letting countries sign up for emissions reduction levels and then trusting them to follow through. We had experienced this starkly with the very first climate agreement, reached at the 1992 UNFCCC in Rio, which relied entirely on voluntary commitments and thus quickly fell apart. Ensuring that countries were transparent about the actions they were taking, and that their efforts were verifiable by third parties, was essential, we realized. This didn’t sit well with China, which informally led the bloc of developing nations. China viewed robust transparency measures as an infringement on its sovereignty.
While I was not part of the official negotiating team at Copenhagen—that was the prerogative of the State Department—as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I had a number of meetings with negotiators from both the American and foreign delegations. Their frustration was palpable. On every one of the major issues, they were making little progress. I knew from experience it wasn’t going to be easy—when you’re dealing with nearly two hundred countries, how can it be?—but the negotiations were even more constipated than I anticipated. The talks just weren’t going anywhere.
President Obama’s team had hoped a deal would be in hand by the time he touched down. Instead, he arrived in Copenhagen to find his work cut out for him. China and the so-called G77—the seventy-seven developing nations of the world—were stubbornly avoiding responsibility for major reductions. The president was forced to literally rush from meeting to meeting. He was conducting whirlwind personal diplomacy. To try to salvage some success in Copenhagen, he even crashed a meeting between the leaders of China, India, Brazil and South Africa. President Obama was able to convince his counterparts at least to come together around a list of principles. It became known as the Copenhagen Accord. But it was not the full-fledged agreement he intended.
In the environmental community, Copenhagen was generally deemed a failure. It did not augur well for urgently needed emissions reductions. But it did achieve two critical goals: First, the world’s major economies—developed and developing alike—agreed to make national commitments to reduce pollution. Second, they agreed to be transparent. This would at least be a building block for subsequent efforts.
Previous negotiations had established the next major deadline for agreement in Paris in 2015. The parties committed to try again for a global reduction of emissions. Achieving an agreement in Paris became the focus of all our energy.
During the years I was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I consistently talked to the Chinese about climate change. I met frequently with Xie Zhenhua, the Chinese minister in charge of climate negotiations. We met in China, in the United States, at conferences around the world, all of which steadily built a trusting, personal relationship. On one occasion, we actually met at a transient airport restaurant because of our travel schedules. In addition, I met with a number of high-level Chinese government officials, including Xi Jinping, who would soon become the nation’s president. They insisted that China grasped the urgency of the problem and was ready to be a partner. I know talk is cheap, but these many conversations made me believe there was an opening. I sensed a real partnership was possible.
Now I wanted to put it to the test as secretary of state.
When formally sworn in on February 1, 2013, one of my earli
est meetings was with Todd Stern, the president’s climate envoy, and his team. I immediately asked for input on how we could expand climate cooperation between the United States and China. Todd was supportive, but when he realized I was talking about the expanded cooperation beginning in a matter of weeks or months, not years, he expressed skepticism. He argued that the UNFCCC process didn’t work like that—and neither did the Chinese. We had to start with baby steps—a decision to begin exploring areas of cooperation, for example—negotiated on the staff level, and then eventually the process would reach Todd’s level, and then, perhaps, it would be appropriate for the senior-most government officials to get involved. Danny Russel, who would a few months later become my assistant secretary for Asia, also warned that the Chinese way of doing anything was slow, steady and incremental. The Chinese tended to resist sudden, high-level decision-making. I valued their caution, but we didn’t have the luxury of time.
From my own experience, I knew China had a time-honored approach, but I also believed China was ready to do more. When then Chinese foreign minister Yang Jiechi reached out to congratulate me shortly after I was sworn in, I took the opportunity to explain my thinking. “China and the U.S. represent more than 45 percent of global emissions,” I told him. “If we find constructive ways to approach this, we can set an example for the world.” He agreed that U.S.-China climate cooperation would be good for both countries and the world. “I share your interests,” he said. “We need to work together.”
I spoke to Minister Yang again in the weeks before my first trip to China in April 2013. I told him I planned to come to Beijing with some thoughts on what we might be able to accomplish together.
