John Kerry: Countries that fail to transition to clean energy are going to suffer economically

Ireland might very well avoid some of the worst effects of climate change, says former US climate envoy John Kerry.
But like all countries of the world, it won’t be able to hold back sea-level rise, he says, and as a rich country of the Global North, we certainly won’t avoid climate migration if the collective response of signatories to the Paris Agreement, the 2016 international treaty on climate, is not what it needs to be.
Getting off fossil fuels – as agreed last year at Cop28 in Dubai, the UN’s climate conference, by almost 200 countries including all of the world’s worst carbon emitters – has to be “fair, equitable and orderly”, the former US secretary of state and, until recently, the climate envoy to US president Joe Biden tells The Irish Times in an interview on a visit to Dublin this week.
“It’s not going to be orderly if tens of millions of people no longer have food production capacity in Africa – which is a threat – and they’re wandering the planet looking for a place to live … they’re not going to knock on the door of Saudi Arabia and live in the desert,” he says. “They’re going to bang on the countries that have trees and lakes and streams and water and light.”
Kerry was in Dublin to receive the annual Impact Ireland Award presented by Taoiseach Simon Harris at an event hosted by investment company VentureWave Capital, which is chaired by former taoiseach Enda Kenny.
The 2004 US Democratic presidential nominee spends a lot of his time now trying to encourage derisked investment in the less developed world including the Global South.
“It deserves every bit of attention but that’s not going to win this battle,” he says. “What wins this battle is the developed world doing what’s necessary to meet the target of a 43-50 per cent reduction of emissions by 2030 and get to net zero in 2050.”
Kerry says developed countries such as the US and China – responsible for about 80 per cent of carbon emissions – are “moving much slower than they should be” and this was “causing this agony for so many vulnerable and less developed nations”.
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He believes this “growing anger is something people better take note of, because it’s going to affect global conflict and global enterprise and global relationships”.
He does not wish to get into the trenches on the US election. It is taking place amid a backdrop of stubbornly high global emissions, record-breaking temperatures, extreme flooding causing devastation in every continent last month and the possibility that Donald Trump, who calls climate change a hoax, will become US president again.
“It’s a hypothetical, I don’t want to entertain it for obvious reasons,” he says of that possibility.
He believes the world has made the decision to transition to clean energy. “It will be at varying paces with varying technologies … The question is not will we – all of us – come to live in low-carbon, no-carbon economies. We will. The question is: will we get there in time to avoid the worst consequences of the crisis?”
He believes Trump can’t do what he thinks he can, because transitioning to clean energy is unstoppable. “And a country that doesn’t keep up is going to suffer economically,” he says.
He is worried oceans are warming so much that they are hot-tub warm in places such as Florida, fuelling extreme weather as evidenced this week by Hurricane Helene, one of the worst storms in US history.
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In 1988 Nasa scientist Jim Hansen came before the US Congress to outline how climate change was happening, recalls Kerry. That eventually led to the UN Cops (Conferences of the Parties).
“We tried to come up with a structure which would bring nations to the table to deal with the crisis, and we couldn’t get anybody to agree to a mandatory structure by which you have to produce or you have to live by a global standard, they just weren’t going to do it. Politics, ideology, a whole bunch of things got in the way.”
He will be pushing for faster action from the sidelines of the 29th Cop this year in Baku.
“We’ve been told for 30 years this is existential. We’ve been told for 30 years what’s going to happen, and every bit of that prediction is not [only] happening, but happening bigger, faster, more destructive than what was predicted,” he says.
The world is pursuing “more oil, more gas, more drilling”. Burning of fossil fuels is of most concern to Kerry.
Although the world may have decided “to live the way we want to live”, Kerry believes people can be sold the benefits of having a cleaner environment. “You’ll lead a better life. You can actually have cleaner air. You can actually have a healthier world.”
Kerry believes there can be a breakthrough, with citizens demanding action, especially young people, the leaders of every big social shift of recent decades.
“They’re ready. They are hungry, desperate to have leadership and have people put the right choices on the table,” he says. This must be backed by policies and an incentivised private sector, he adds.
“We can’t do this without the private sector. No country has enough money to effect this transition … budgets are under pressure and duress everywhere,” he says.
As Barack Obama’s secretary of state from 2013 to 2017, Kerry is acutely aware of complexities in the Middle East. He came agonisingly close in 2014 to securing agreement between Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas for land swaps and up to 80 per cent of Israeli settlers returning to Israeli territory but the deal was rejected by Netanyahu.
The October 7th attack by Palestinian group Hamas on Israel last year changes a lot, he says. The nature of that attack “begged for revenge and retaliation”, says Kerry.
“One has to clearly respect the feelings in Israel as a consequence. The nation is in trauma from that and still fighting on several fronts, many fronts.
“The key is that it’s going to take a while. Now the equation has to change slightly.”
The biggest lesson for him in negotiating the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement that put restrictions on the country’s nuclear programme was “the rightness of diplomacy and deals that you can make”.
“We found leadership that was ready to do it. We don’t have that on either side [currently]. I’m not blaming one or the other,” he says.
A peace process must be universally supported, with a big role for Arab countries.
“You can’t do it while Iran is threatening. You can’t do while Hizbullah [the Lebanese militant group] is bombing, so you have to tame the beasts to begin to be able to see a road ahead,” he says.
Obama used to accuse Kerry of being too optimistic. He says he doesn’t have room for despair in his mission for climate action. The words of former US president John F Kennedy – both represented Massachusetts in the US senate – always ring true for him: “God’s work must truly be our own.”
“This is a human-created situation. So we need to kick everybody into higher gear. New technology is moving. Money is moving. I’m energised by that,” he says.
He comes back to where the world is right now.
“This is about as big a confrontation of reality at an inflection point as you can get in life,” he says. “And if you want your grandchildren and children to live in a world where it’s liveable, we have to move faster than we are today – do the things that we said we’re going to do.”