John Kerry, the U.S. special presidential envoy for climate, said in a new interview with The Boston Globe that he told President Biden that he will serve in his role through at least the United Nations climate summit in November.
“There’s sufficient unfinished business that I felt it would be inappropriate to walk away from that at this point in time,” he told the newspaper.
The climate summit, named COP28, will be held in Dubai later this year. Kerry, a former secretary of state and senator, said he hopes to promote new technologies and more funding to accelerate addressing climate change.
“We absolutely understand the road ahead and what we need to do, and I think we can make this COP even more important in terms of eliciting increased ambition,” he said. “This has a chance of kicking everybody in the rear end and pushing this process into higher gear, which is where it needs to go.”
“My main objective is to raise the ante at this COP, so we are coming out of there with a head of steam on emissions reduction and finance,” Kerry added. “There are things that are riper, more compelling, more obvious, more necessary, more urgent.”
Throughout his time in his role, Kerry has focused on building cooperation between nations to address the climate crisis, after former President Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Accords, an international treaty on climate change.
In 2021, Kerry announced that China and the United States came to a surprise agreement on climate change that included phasing out coal and reducing methane emissions, and said that the world could not “solve the climate crisis” without China.
Source: The Hill
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