MARRAKESH, Morocco — In what is likely his last appearance at a United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change event, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry had a simple message for world leaders, present and future: pay attention to the science on climate change. “Above all, consult with the scientists who have dedicated their entire lives to expanding our understanding of this challenge, and whose work will be in vain unless we sound the alarm loud enough for everyone to hear. No one has a right to make decisions that affect billions of people based on solely ideology or without proper input,” Kerry said here Wednesday at the 22nd session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Kerry implored leaders, presumably including U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, a vocal climate change skeptic, to discuss the issue with presidents and other heads of state across the world who are responding to the threat. He also urged them to talk to business leaders, economists, military leaders, farmers, fisherman, the Pope and other faith leaders, activists, and young people, all of whom believe climate change to be a danger.
Kerry’s message was a clear call to Trump to think very carefully about what he is doing before he makes good on a number of climate change-related campaign promises. The Republican has pledged to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, which was a adopted by the UNFCCC last year and entered into force earlier this month.
With that milestone, the United States is bound to the accord for four years, making it more difficult, though perhaps not impossible, for Trump to pull out. Recent reports suggest the president-elect is considering withdrawing the United States from the UNFCCC altogether.
“While I can’t stand here and speculate about what policies our president-elect will pursue, I will tell you this: In the time that I have spent in public life, one of the things I have learned is that some issues look a little bit different when you’re actually in office compared to when you’re on the campaign trail,” Kerry said.
Many nations have made clear at COP22 that even if the U.S. abandons the agreement, their climate action will continue. China and France have stated intentions to take leadership roles in the absence of the U.S. China has also gone so far as to state specifically that it is not behind the “hoax” of climate change, as Trump has suggested in the past.
The Paris Agreement is the first international climate agreement to apply to both developed and developing nations. Under the agreement nations are to submit nationally determined climate action plans. The submission of the plans is legally required, but the pledges made in them are not. The agreement entered into force Nov. 4, shifting the focus of the UNFCCC to implementation.
Kerry called upon the nations of the UNFCCC to act quickly and build on the ambition of the Paris Agreement. “We know that we have not come to Marrakesh to bask in the glow of Paris. We’ve come here to move forward. In doing so, we cannot forget that the contributions we’ve each made thus far were never meant to be the ceiling. They’re a foundation on which we expect to build. And unless our nations voluntarily ratchet up our ambition, and unless we continue to put sustained pressure on one another to act wisely, we will have difficulty meeting the current mitigation needs, let alone holding temperature increases at 2 degrees warming, which science tells us is a tipping point,” he said.
The Paris Agreement sets a goal of limiting global temperature to 2 degrees Celsius, while trying to keep it below 1.5 degrees. However, the commitments nations have made in the Paris Agreement will not meet that goal. To address that issue the accord requires nations to submit new, more stringent, action plans every five years.
“If we fall short, it will be the single greatest instance in modern history of a generation in a time of crisis abdicating responsibility for the future. And it won’t just be a policy failure; because of the nature of this challenge, it will be a moral failure, a betrayal of devastating consequence,” Kerry said.
