Australia’s government, which will preside over the next UN climate summit, should gather the world’s 25 biggest greenhouse gasemitting countries and push them to draw up a roadmap to end the era of fossil fuels, former US secretary of state John Kerry has said.
Only by “hard-nosed” confrontation with fossil fuel producers, and reducing their consumption in major economies, would the world be able to tackle the climate crisis, he said.
Australia’s climate change and energy minister, Chris Bowen, has been given the role of “president of negotiations”, even though the Cop31 climate summit will be held in Turkey, after the two countries agreed to compromise on hosting arrangements.
“We need to be more demanding, more pushy,” he told the Guardian in an exclusive interview. “The Australian president [of the Cop31 climate summit] needs to take charge. Only if you get China, Russia, the US, India and Europe together and they decide to really do the transition [to a clean economy] everyone else will follow.”
This would be difficult, he admitted. “Saudi Arabia and Russia will be hard,” he said. The US under Donald Trump was also unlikely to take part without severe pressure. But Kerry said: “I think some fossil fuel producers will set a roadmap.”
Even the process of calling such a meeting would be useful, by isolating those who refuse to take part, many of whom prefer to stay in the shadows, according to Kerry, who was climate envoy to Joe Biden after serving as secretary of state in Barack Obama’s second term.
“It will expose the objectors,” he said. “Call them out. People need to see that if you’re not part of the process, you’re part of the problem. Everyone has to run out of patience with the games that are being played.”
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Australia will host the Cop31 meeting next November, after Cop30 in Brazil ended last Saturday with only a partial deal that omitted direct mention of the “transition away from fossil fuels” that countries are supposed to be embarked on, but allowed for a voluntary initiative for willing countries to start drawing up a roadmap for the phaseout.
Donald Trump stayed away from the summit, having dismissed the climate crisis as a “con job” in a speech at the UN general assembly in September.
Kerry has personal experience of tough negotiations with both China and Saudi Arabia, which is what leads him to believe a fossil fuel roadmap is possible. At the Cop28 summit in Dubai in 2023, nations agreed for the first time to “transition away from fossil fuels”, but they set no end date or process for it.
Kerry, as US presidential climate envoy, helped broker that deal at a climactic meeting with Saudi Arabia’s oil minister Prince Abdulaziz in the early hours of the final morning after a marathon all-night negotiating session.
For the first time, he spoke openly to the Guardian about the experience. “Abdulaziz wanted to try to find a way to be a helpful player,” he said. “At least, one part of him wanted not to know, but the other part of him was more open. Very happily, it was that part that came.”
He went on: “I like him, he is very direct, he is honest about what his concerns are, and what the realities of the marketplace are. He puts it on the table. I find him to be a good interlocutor.”
In January, Kerry will visit the UAE and Saudi Arabia to push his ideas further.
Australia also must “do proper spadework” in preparing the ground for Cop31, Kerry warned, unlike what happened at Cop30, when the idea was only really championed by a group of more than 80 developed and developing countries halfway through the process.
“It was a shame they did not try earlier to begin the process with the fossil fuel [roadmap] and then build it up at Cop,” he said. “Australia needs to come to the table with options for what the proposal ought to be. [They need to] respect other countries’ positions, and what is possible for them.”
Even reluctant countries would have to acknowledge their role in the climate crisis, as its impacts continue to gather force, he added. “Mother Nature is going to make it crystal clear,” he said. “You will have to show your people how you will keep them alive at 50C, or where their food and water is going to come from. That is an inevitability.”
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Kerry praised the Brazilian presidency which ran Cop30. “They did their best in difficult circumstances. Cop is very difficult, it’s the hardest diplomacy in the world, made harder when big countries that have a big impact are not pulling their weight or rowing in the same direction.”
But he also spoke of the run-up to Cop30, in which countries were supposed to set out strengthened plans on cutting their emissions, in line with the goal of limiting global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, with that of Cop26, where the last round of plans were to be unveiled. “Raising ambition [on emissions cuts] was the whole focus of our diplomacy,” he said.
Though Kerry did not allude to it directly, Brazil claimed frequently ahead of Cop30 that the national plans – called nationally determined contributions (NDCs) – were nothing to do with the Cop presidency.
“By not achieving something concrete, the Cops get discredited,” Kerry warned. “And the planet itself gets further in extremis.”
Kerry also enjoyed a warm relationship with China’s climate envoy, Xie Zhenhua. They gave a joint press conference at the end of Cop28 in which they talked of their friendship, and soon afterwards retired within weeks of each other.
By contrast, China played little public role at Cop30, though behind the scenes it did not object to the fossil fuel phaseout roadmap nor to attempts to make direct reference to it in the legal outcome text.
“I do not feel that kind of effort of diplomacy [from developed countries towards the Chinese] was made in the walk-up to this Cop,” he said.
Kerry also warned that new ways must be found to persuade people to make the climate crisis “a voting issue” to force politicians to take notice. “What is clear here is that people do not want to hear all the bad things. They want to know how this [transition to clean energy] makes their lives better,” he said. “If you say it, their eyes glaze over. You have to say there is a better choice for you.”
Already, with insurers refusing to insure homes at threat in Florida, Texas, Louisiana and other US states, people were facing higher mortgage rates or the possibility of not being able to buy or stay in their homes. “If you say to people, you could save money on energy and here is what you will have to spend on your mortgage [if we stick with fossil fuels], then people will begin to understand the practicalities.”
