Window Seat on the World

by Glen Johnson

  While those issues weren’t a major focus of his sixty-seven predecessors as secretary of State, John Kerry had a lifelong interest in the environment and had made its preservation a focus of his public life.

  He helped organize the first Earth Day in Massachusetts in 1970, and led the first hearings on acid rain after being elected lieutenant governor of Massachusetts in 1982.

  He came to the US Senate in 1985 with Al Gore, who would go on to write Earth in the Balance and gain worldwide fame for his own devotion to preserving the environment. The two worked alongside Senators Tim Wirth of Colorado and Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey to focus the country on the issue.

  John Kerry also regularly attended the Conference of Parties environmental summits organized by the United Nations. He was reintroduced to Teresa Heinz in 1992 at the “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro that laid the foundation for the COP meetings. The couple married two years later.

  When Senator Kerry was nominated at the end of 2012 to become Secretary Kerry, he staked out his ground during his confirmation hearing.

  “Climate change is already prompting substantial changes in many parts of the world, and if not effectively addressed, presents a range of security and economic risks, many of them quite serious,” he testified. “Understanding the behavior of polar ice sheets in a warming planet, for example, is essential to understanding the rate and magnitude of sea-level rise, which could have far-reaching economic and humanitarian impacts.”407

  Once sworn in, the secretary began not only to execute on his plan to elevate climate change in the context of diplomacy, but also to pass a meaningful climate change agreement at the 2015 Conference of Parties meeting in Paris.

  The first piece of the puzzle, as he saw it, was getting China on board with announcing voluntary limits before the COP meeting. He launched this effort during his first visit to Beijing in April 2013 and kept at it through Chinese state councilor Yang Jiechi’s trip to Boston in October 2014.

  During President Obama’s own trip to Beijing in November 2014, he and President Xi Jinping cemented their deal.

  The New York Times labeled that a “landmark agreement” that was “the signature achievement of an unexpectedly productive two days of meetings between the leaders.”408

  It was just the first outcome from Kerry’s multipronged approach.

  In May 2013, we flew to Stockholm not only for a brief bilateral visit with Swedish leaders but also, more significantly, as the jumping-off point for a trip above the Arctic Circle.

  We made the trek to Kiruna, Sweden, for a meeting of the Arctic Council, a forum for addressing issues faced by countries within the Arctic and their residents. Those nations are Canada; Denmark, representing Greenland and the Faroe Islands; Finland; Iceland; Norway; Sweden; Russia; and the United States, through its purchase of Alaska in 1867.409

  Sweden held the chairmanship in 2013 and, by tradition, the annual council meetings are held above the Arctic Circle. That brought us to the northernmost town in Sweden, home to 17,000 people and a massive iron ore mine fueling the community’s economy.410

  The sun doesn’t rise for most of December, nor does it set from late May to mid-July.

  In remarks to the Council, Secretary Kerry recalled his work with the late senator Ted Stevens of Alaska to end driftnet fishing in the high seas, and his efforts to protect fisheries by helping write the Magnuson-Stevens Act.

  He said the Arctic, a peaceful place despite territorial claims by eight countries encircling the North Pole, needed to be carefully managed amid increased energy exploration and a loss of ice that opened new global shipping lanes. He said:

  Last September, the extent of sea ice covering the Arctic reached a record low, threatening marine mammal life and the indigenous and local communities that depend on them. . . . Warming also erodes the natural barrier of ice that shields Alaska’s coast from hostile waters, and that causes homes to fall into the sea, it causes pollution. And the thawing of the permafrost, which is increasingly releasing methane—which is 20 times more damaging than CO2—that has led to the first Arctic wildfires in thousands of years.

    So, the scientific research in each of our countries is more imperative than ever in order to protect the atmosphere, the global economy, the food chain, and the air we breathe.411

  We’d attend a similar meeting the following year in Iqaluit, Canada, where organizers erected an igloo outside the conference center. In September 2016, the United States played host to an Arctic Council meeting in Barrow, Alaska.

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  KERRY GOT A MORE definitive look at climate change in the northern hemisphere during another trip in June 2016, during his stint as the council’s chairman. On a hopscotch itinerary not atypical for his tenure, we headed to Norway, Denmark, and Greenland—via the Caribbean.

  The secretary had a standing commitment in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, for the Organization of American States’ 46th General Assembly. But then he flew nine and a half hours north to the Nordic states to speak at the Oslo Forum, an annual retreat for conflict mediators. He also attended bilateral meetings with Norwegian and Danish leaders in each country’s capital.

  The highlight of his trip, though, was the opportunity to learn about climate change in some of the most remote yet accessible places in the Arctic region.

  His first such stop was Svalbard, Norway, a cluster of islands about 650 miles from the North Pole. The archipelago is home to the northernmost year-round settlement on Earth.412

  He was accompanied by Norwegian foreign minister Børge Brende, who shared the secretary’s concern about climate change and had been a steadfast ally in many of his diplomatic endeavors. The two had also developed a friendship by dint of the foreign minister’s cheerful demeanor. It was hard to find anyone in the diplomatic community who didn’t like Brende.

  We flew our big C-32 from Oslo to Svalbard Airport in Longyearbyen, Norway, a trip taking us up the Scandinavian Peninsula shared by Norway and Sweden, and then across the confluence of the Norwegian, Barents, and Greenland seas. We switched to a twin-engine propeller plane for an additional flight a half hour north.

  We landed on a hilltop runway at Ny-Ålesund, a town that is home to the Ny-Ålesund Arctic Research Station. Its brightly colored huts house about 120 people in the summer, and some 35 year-round. Reindeer walk through the village and the locals often tote rifles as protection against the polar bears that also wander downtown.

  The remoteness was underscored when we stepped off the plane and one of our hosts pointed up into the hills of nearby Spitsbergen. There, poking out the side of a sandstone mountain, was the concrete portal to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

  It is, in essence, a doomsday storehouse for plant seeds held in other gene banks around the world. It’s considered the ultimate fallback because its vault is about 400 feet inside the mountain, located in a place without tectonic activity, and 430 feet above sea level.413

  The seeds, stored in triple-sealed packets, would remain dry even if both polar ice caps melted and rising seas pushed ocean water up the mountain.

  That was a fitting fact, because scientists who briefed Secretary Kerry at the Research Station told him how global warming was leading to changes in plant life and animal migration and causing glaciers to recede. He also got a firsthand look when he boarded a research boat and motored across the Kongsforden inlet to see the Kronebreen and Kongsvegen glaciers.

  We in the staff chased along in a flotilla of Zodiac-style rubber boats. We wore boots and dry suits to guard against hypothermia in the event we fell overboard.

  Our mode of transport was telling in and of itself: the scientists said the only way to formerly reach the glaciers was to snowmobile across the fjord’s frozen surface. Now everyone was bobbing in boats floating on sparkling water.

  Climate change had turned solid to liquid.

  We all marveled at the deep blue color of the glacial ice several hundred yards away, and the soil that had becom
e embedded in it as the glaciers plowed their way from land to sea.

  Jan Gunnar Winther, a glaciologist and head of the Norwegian Polar Institute, told Kerry the glaciers were melting away not only on top because of rising atmospheric temperatures, but also from below by warmer seawater undermining them.414

  The visit left an impression on the secretary as he walked back into the village for our flight to Denmark.

  “This is the center of the biggest transition taking place, the greatest evidence of change, and I thought it was really important to come here and listen to scientists and learn what they’re seeing and get a firsthand view of this transition,” he told a TV interviewer. “What is at stake is, literally, the survivability of people on the planet if we don’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit the rise of temperature.”415

  The following day, Kerry and Danish foreign minister Kristian Jensen boarded our plane for a nearly five-hour flight from Copenhagen to Kangerlussuaq, Greenland. The Dane hosted the secretary because Greenland, while an independent country, is part of the Kingdom of Denmark.

  Kangerlussuaq is a small town at the eastern end of a fjord on the southwestern coast of Greenland. The airport was a US airbase during World War II, and it seemed like we stepped back in time when we got off the plane.416 There was virtually nothing around us except for the high walls of the fjord and a ribbon of water separating them and running off into the horizon.

  We transferred to a chartered Air Greenland propeller plane for a forty-five-minute flight—complete with drink service—further north to Ilulissat, Greenland. The trip was eye-opening.

  We flew over rocky hills and water in varying shades of blue. Bright white ice bobbed in spots and the pilots pointed out places where glaciers formerly stretched to the sea. Then, taking advantage of the good weather, they turned east and flew all the way up the Jakobshavn Glacier, which was breaking up after having formerly reached the ocean intact.

  When we got to the calving front—the point where the splits in the glacier end and the solid ice resumes—they slowed and circled to let us see deep crevices in the ice and brilliant pools of turquoise water on the glacier’s surface.

  While Jakobshavn is thought to have produced the iceberg that sunk the RMS Titanic, the speed with which the glacier has moved toward the ocean recently, coupled with the retreat of the calving front, indicate the ice is thinning and the entire ice sheet over Greenland is draining into the ocean more rapidly.417

  The phenomenon was captured in the 2012 film Chasing Ice, when photographers who’d camped in a tent overlooking the glacier filmed a nearly two-cubic-mile piece breaking off the glacier and falling into the nearby ocean.418

  An estimated 86 million metric tons breaks off the Jakobshavn Glacier each day. If melted, that daily deposit would provide enough water to serve New York City for a year. Similar activity in ice sheets around the world contributes to sea-level rise, a threat to low-lying development globally.

  It also portends even greater problems in Antarctica, because the loss of ice has the potential to be one hundred times worse than that in the Arctic, according to David Holland, an American scientist from New York University who briefed the secretary.419

  We drove from the airport to Ilulissat Harbor, where Kerry boarded the HMS Thetis, a Danish Navy vessel, for a firsthand look at the ice floes that had separated from the glacier. Sunglasses perched atop his head, he looked out across Disko Bay at icebergs hundreds of yards across—and that was only the 10 percent visible on the surface.

  The scenery was prone to hyperbole, but for all those who saw it firsthand, the secretary’s remarks to reporters afterward were not.

  “This has been a significant eye-opener for me, and I’ve spent twenty-five years or more engaged in this issue,” Kerry said. “There’s no mistaking that we are contributing to climate change—we human beings—and we have choices that can undo the damage that is being done or reduce, at least mitigate, the worst effects, so that we can preserve life as we know it and want it to be on this planet.”420

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  THE SECRETARY’S TRAVELS ACROSS the northern hemisphere, particularly in June 2016, were buttressed by similar exploratory trips and related environmental diplomacy around the belly of the Earth throughout his term.

  In June 2013, just months after broaching the idea of voluntary carbon caps during his first trip to China, Kerry chose his first trip to another impor- tant country—India—to deliver a tough message on the topic of climate change.

  More than half of the massive nation’s power comes from burning coal. At the same time, 300 million people—roughly the population of the United States—lack electricity.

  The secretary argued that switching to clean, renewable power would not only help the environment but also provide energy to people currently off the grid. One idea was creating community solar arrays: installing a cluster of solar panels to power a village, instead of waiting for it to be connected via wires strung across hundreds of miles of countryside.

  Leaders in developing nations often take offense at such arguments, regardless of their practicality. They point out the United States and other developed countries fueled their economic rises with an Industrial Revolution powered by cheap fossil fuels such as coal and oil. They say it’s their inherent right to do what they need to do to catch up economically and developmentally.

  But the secretary also highlighted the rising concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—reported the month prior at four hundred parts per million, an unprecedented level in record keeping—as part of another cost to India and other nations around the globe.

  The secretary said:

  When the desert is creeping into East Africa, and ever more scarce resources push farmers and herders into deadly conflict, where people are already, in parts of the world, fighting over water, then this is a matter of shared security for all of us. When we face major threats from extreme weather events of the kind that were predicted by climate science, including in my country, we all have to act. When the Himalayan glaciers are receding, threatening the very supply of water to almost a billion people, we all need to do better.421

  Part of “doing better,” to the secretary’s way of thinking, was investing in clean energy. It could not only provide renewable power but also create economic opportunity by letting entrepreneurs tap into a market that could serve up to 4 billion people and be worth up to $6 trillion.

  “I emphasize the dynamic, forward-looking India of today is not going to find its energy mix in the 19th century or the 20th century solutions,” Kerry said. “It won’t find it in the coal mines. India’s destiny requires finding a formula in the 21st century that will power it into the 22nd.”422

  A little more than a month later, the secretary visited the Zero Point Power Plant in Islamabad, Pakistan. He wanted to learn about how a similar dearth of electricity in India’s neighbor was impeding its economic development. Pakistani minister of power and water Khawaja Asif pronounced it “a bigger menace to our economy, to our existence, than the war on terror.”423

  The US Agency for International Development, which works in conjunction with the State Department to disburse foreign assistance, had provided funding for better metering of Pakistan’s existing supply. That helped to manage service outages.

  “One of the greatest single restraints, one of the greatest pullbacks against growth, is the lack of energy,” Kerry said after touring the power plant. “If a company is going to situate itself somewhere and open its manufacturing doors, it needs to have energy. If a school is going to open, it needs to have energy. To build homes, people need to have energy.”424

  In October 2013, we visited Bali to join President Obama in Indonesia for the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. The president ended up canceling his attendance because of a government shutdown back in Washington. Secretary Kerry represented him at the APEC meeting in Bali, which assembled leaders of twenty-one Pacific Rim economies.


  We took time on that trip to visit fishermen at nearby Benoa Port to learn about their efforts to create a sustainable fishery. Allowing fish stocks to replenish is vital to maintaining the primary source of protein for 60 million Indonesians, as well as the fish supply for more distant consumers frequenting Outback Steakhouse restaurants and Whole Foods grocery stores in the United States.

  Several fishermen and government and industry leaders briefed Kerry as he climbed across fishing boats and poked at freshly caught tuna being held on ice.

  “We face the same challenge in our fisheries in America,” the secretary told them. “Just as in New England or in the Pacific—in the state of Washington or California, where we have fishermen—we need scientific information to be able to make the best fishing decisions.”425

  During our final trip in 2013, we detoured from Manila to Tacloban City on the island of Leyte in the Philippines to see the damage caused by Typhoon Haiyan. It had roared through the region a month earlier and proved to be the deadliest hurricane to hit the Philippines in history.

  It killed 6,300 people just in that country alone, and had peak winds tying the record for a typhoon making landfall.426

  Kerry focused on that point after flying over homes covered with blue tarps, driving past flattened trees and crops, and touring a center distributing grain from the USAID.

  “We . . . know that while no single storm can be attributed to climate change, we do know to a certainty that rising temperatures will lead to longer and more unpredictable monsoon seasons and will lead to more extreme weather events,” the secretary said. “So, looking around here, you see an unmistakable example of what an extreme weather event looks like, and a reminder of our responsibility to act to protect the future.”427

  In February 2014, Kerry delivered his second truth-to-power environmental speech, this time during a visit to Jakarta, Indonesia. A developing nation like India, Indonesia is the world’s fifth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, attributed not to increased technology use but to its development of forests and peatlands. Both activities release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.428