World Is Falling Behind in Climate Battle, Kerry Warns
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Environmental ministers from two dozen nations meet Thursday
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Too many coal power plants on the drawing board, Kerry says
U.S. climate chief John Kerry is set to warn roughly two dozen nations Thursday that the world isn’t moving fast enough to arrest global warming, as countries burn more coal and clean energy legislation falters in Congress.
“We’re not in a good track right now,” Kerry said in an interview for an episode “The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations” set to be broadcast on Feb. 16. “The world is not serious enough about reducing our emissions fast enough.”
Kerry, President Joe Biden’s special envoy for climate, said he would deliver that assessment during a virtual meeting on Thursday of fellow environmental ministers from countries responsible for 80% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. “I will be raising the subject that we are behind,” Kerry added. …
“There’s about 300 gigawatts of new coal construction coming online at a time where the International Energy Agency says you’ve got to reduce coal plants by 870 gigawatts,” he said. “The imbalance of that is dangerous for everybody and is at the heart of what we really have to tackle now.”
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Kerry, who helped broker the landmark 2015 Paris agreement and a follow-on pact at last year’s United Nations climate summit in Glasgow, linked the climate and coronavirus crises, saying in both cases the consequences of inaction are clear and costly.
“When 99% of the people dying are unvaccinated, and 97% of the people going to the hospital are unvaccinated, you get a message from that,” Kerry said. “It’s about the same thing here. We’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars cleaning up the mess after a storm that we might have been better off preventing in the first place.”
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In Glasgow, part of Kerry’s mission was assuring other nations the U.S. would follow through on its pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions at least in half by the end of the decade, despite past retreats from the climate fight. Now, more than two months later, U.S. credibility on the issue remains at stake, with Biden’s climate-and-spending bill stalled in the Senate.
“It’s a tragically teachable moment. I don’t say this in a partisan way. But the parallels [between COVID-19 and climate change] are screaming at us, both positive and negative.” – “You could just as easily replace the words climate change with COVID-19; it is truly the tale of two pandemics deferred, denied, and distorted, one with catastrophic consequences, the other with even greater risk if we don’t reverse course…The long-term parallels between this pandemic and tomorrow’s gathering storm of climate crisis are more clear.” – “If the economic devastation of the coronavirus pandemic is costly today, the cost of climate inaction will match — if not exceed — our current expenditures, which is why the next administration must act with urgency on day one.” – John Kerry, former Sec. of State
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Former Sec. of State John Kerry on ‘the parallels between the coronavirus and the climate crisis’: “Climate change is a threat multiplier for pandemic diseases, and zoonotic diseases — 70 percent of all human infections — are impacted by climate change and its effect on animal migration and habitats.”
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John Kerry imagine emissions cuts can prevent storms:
"We’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars cleaning up the mess after a storm that we might have been better off preventing in the first place."#SayAnythinghttps://t.co/RVcJ15kTIm via @business
— Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) January 27, 2022
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Schumer claims: Human Beings Could Reduce Frequency of Hurricanes
New York Senator Chuck Schumer: “If we would do more on climate change, we’d have fewer of these hurricanes and other types of storms. Everyone knows that, except a few.” – Schumer said the Trump administration has done nothing but “move the issue backward.”
Marc Morano comment: “Pass a pork-barrel spending bill to improve the weather!? Mann must be utilizing every ounce of his Ph.D. to have come up with climate ‘solution.'” See:‘BONKERS!’ Watch Morano Minute: ‘The Jurassic, Holocene, and now….Manchin-cene??!’ Climate activists say Sen. Manchin’s opposition to Biden’s pork-barrel spending will alter Earth’s geologic record!
Michael Mann on MSNBC: “Well, you know, we need to pass Build Back Better, because that –that bill has climate provisions that will address this problem at its, you know, at its core, which is the warming of the planet due to carbon pollution, fossil fuel burning, so that’s most important. We can prevent this from getting worse if we act on climate.”
