The Post-COP30 World of Energy Technology, Competition, and Cooperation to Address the Climate Crisis

Former U.S. Secretary of State and former U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry discusses the state of global and U.S. climate policy, the opportunities and challenges of advancing energy innovation, and the potential for economic growth through clean technology leadership.

VAITHEESWARAN: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to today’s Council on Foreign Relations meeting on “The Post-COP30 World of Energy Technology, Competition, and Cooperation to Address the Climate Crisis” with Secretary John Kerry. Hey, you can’t say the CFR lacks ambition with our framing of our events, right?

I’m Vijay Vaitheeswaran. I’m the global energy and climate innovation editor of the Economist. It’s my great pleasure and honor to be your immoderate moderator for our conversation today.

We’re joined by CFR members both virtually and in person here in New York. So I welcome you all here as well as those who are joining virtually. I’d like to remind everyone that this meeting is on the record and there will be a link posted afterward to our website, where you can find the transcript as well as the video.

And before we welcome our honored guest to the stage I just wanted to point out a couple of reasons to pay particular attention to our stage here at the Council. Many of you will know that earlier this year the Council launched an important initiative known as the Climate Realism Initiative, about six months ago, as a useful tonic and sort of a provocative effort to regain the initiative from a sense of climate denialism and despair that had taken hold in the energy and climate world. Encourage you all to consider participating in that, to look at the research that’s already been launched, and some provocative essays, as well as, I think, very thoughtful way of reframing the conversation.

Clearly, the energy world is at a crossroads. And there’s a lot to play for, which way to go. It’s an important moment, politics not only in Washington but around the world. We at the Economist ran a cover story a couple of months ago arguing that there is a global greenlash, as we called it, where there’s a real rethinking of a particular paradigm of thinking about climate action and energy, of which the U.N. COP process is an important part. And so it is worth reflecting on what are the thoughtful ways forward that reasonable people can come together and agree on. And that’s one of the things the Council, of course, has a long tradition of encouraging and helping foment.

So, without further ado, I will introduce properly John Kerry, who is known to all of you, but certainly with new hats on these days. He’s co-executive chairman of Galvanize Climate Solutions. He’s also a senior—nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. We will remember him as former U.S. special presidential envoy for climate as well as secretary of state. And, of course, he’s a CFR member. Please welcome John Kerry to the stage.

KERRY: Good afternoon, everybody. I don’t know why he says of course he is a member of the foreign relations council—Council on Foreign Relations. Delighted to be here with every single one of you. Thank you for being here and sharing thoughts. And I look forward to, hopefully, a robust conversation. I will press myself to try to keep my opening comments pretty tight so that we can have time to really—you can throw your questions at me, and I can duck them right and left. First of all, Vijay, thank you. Where’d you run off to here? Thanks so much for being part of this. We’ve done this a few times together. It is not a dog and pony show, I promise you. But I appreciate your work, and your writing at the Economist and leadership that you’ve provided.

And I’m sorry Mike isn’t able to be here, but he is a terrific person who followed in Richard Hass’ footsteps. And he’s just smart as hell, as we all know. And I had the pleasure of working with him when I was both secretary and subsequently. So, in fact, I became a life member, just thinking about it when you mentioned this, clickity click—I became a life member, I think, in 1971. And I was opposing the war. And I was a veteran who’d come back. And the Council, venerable institution that it is, was being attacked for being too venerable and too establishment.

And so I was probably the first affirmative action candidate. (Laughs.) And they dragged me in because they wanted a youthful, young voice, and somebody who had been opposed to the war. Because this was viewed as sort of being a, you know, workhorse house for war efforts. Now I come back here, eight-one years old. A lot has happened in between. But I want you to know, much of my life is now countering this ageism. I’m trying to convince everybody that eighty-one is really the new fifty-five. And maybe you’ll all help me by the end of this.

So it is clear that something has happened in this whole debate regarding climate. And there shouldn’t even be a debate. But, as we all know, there’s been a certain weaponization of some of the legacy pieces that were created over the course of the arguments for, now, since 1988, when Al Gore and Tim Wirth, and myself, a group of us, first listened to Jim Hansen testify and tell us that this was here now, then, this was 1988. And, indeed, it was happening. So we now find ourselves in a place where the debate has renewed, but not around facts. Where there’s been a massive branding effort, negative branding, of ESG, wokeism, and climate. And climate has been suggested that it is somehow woke and discardable, whether it’s a hoax or otherwise.

So let me—let me be very clear here. The reason I wanted to come and chat a little bit with you and with others is because we have to change this discussion. And we have to shift gears and recognize what the demands of the marketplace of ideas needs at this point in time. I will say to you, though, you know, obviously this is a time when the climate challenge is growing, not diminishing. And no matter how much any politician wants to will it away, it won’t disappear just by will. It takes action. It takes commitment. And it takes leadership. And it’s very clear that when you—when you measure what other countries are doing, I mean, we are the only country in the world who has a president who has decided to get out of the Paris agreement.

And you have to ask yourself, what do all those other presidents, finance ministers, environment ministers, prime ministers, monarchs, and others around the world, what do they know that somehow has not penetrated the upper levels of our government? So it’s important to understand that there is no viable climate policy without understanding and marrying the current economic policies. They’re linked. And there’s no viable economic policy that isn’t deeply entwined in climate. And I think that’s sort of the beginning place where this discussion can begin to become more productive.

We seem to be trapped in a strange dichotomy in the world where there are two spheres that are sort of—that are linked. But even as they’re linked, they seem to be pushing in two very different directions. I travel a lot still. I’m talking to leaders in various parts of the world. And I can feel this in all of the dialogue on a global basis. And more and more, as I compare these two tracks, intertwined but pulling apart, it reminds me of the opening line of A Tale of Two Cities. It was the best of times and it was the worst of times.

So it’s the best of times, because on one side there’s an invigorated economic transformation happening now, well underway, at an increasingly extraordinary speed and a growing scale. Many, I hope, have read John Doerr’s book and Tom Steyer’s books about speed and scale, and what we need. And it’s the best of times because this is happening at the dawn of the AI age which, if managed correctly, can contribute significantly to it. And I guess the way to summarize is just say there’s an amazing amount that is happening right now, folks, on our shores, in our laboratories, in communities. And we need to take note of that and honor what it means in terms of the politics of those communities and the jobs, and the possibilities that lie ahead.

So it’s the worst of times because, on the other side of the upside I just described, there’s an increasingly fractious, contested political and diplomatic story unfolding as we speak, in Belém with COP30, where too many governments are willingly pulling back—not even pushed, but taking advantage of those places where there is a push to duck, to hide, and not to stand up and fight for what we already agreed to do. There are too many governments who are backstepping or voluntarily surrendering opportunities for their own economies. And I think that it’s pretty obvious to all that China fills vacuum, after vacuum, after vacuum. And if you’re committed to try to compete with China, as we are, publicly, on a bipartisan basis, and committed to want to continue to lead, you can’t just exit the battlefield. There’s no way to make that happen. Doesn’t work.

Now I want you to contrast those two descriptions I just gave you with this headline from Bloomberg. I think it was on Saturday. It was Friday or Saturday. Here it is: You Know Who Believes in Climate Change? The Stock Market. That’s a headline in Bloomberg. The S&P global clean energy index has outpaced the S&P 500

and the Nasdaq 100, and the MSCI World Index. And many leading stocks obviously linked to the boom in AI, but on their own this is happening. I can tell you in my hat—wearing my hat as executive chair of Galvanize, where we have an unbelievable team of people, many of whom left a Goldman or other places here in New York and elsewhere, to come and make decisions that are going to prove to the world that the marketplace here is active and alive and extremely rewarding in terms of returns on investment.

So Bloomberg’s Prepare & Repair Index, which is made up of companies that benefit from the downsides of the climate crisis—when things are destroyed, when you need to rebuild, when you need your electricity up, new, more resilient electricity, and so forth, you turn to these folks. And that index has absolutely shattered the S&P over the past five years, more than doubling its return. And I can tell you, because we have—in Galvanize, we have a public equities strategy. And it’s now three years old. And in that public equity strategy this year, year to date, we’re up 55 percent. You show me how many other people are doing something like that on any of those other indexes, or otherwise.

So, my friends, in the last year the amazing indicators—it’s not rocket science. This is pretty obvious to people. Electricity generated by nuclear power, with zero-emissions energy, is now the highest it has been in our history on the planet, writ large. Which is an extraordinary comeback from where it’s been in recent years, because of Fukushima, and Three Mile Island, and so forth. So in the last year—renewables, by the way, also have generated more electricity on a global basis, for the first time in human history, than coal, during the first part of 2025. So if you look through last year all—of all the new power plants installed in the world, 10 percent run on fossil fuel, 5 percent are nuclear, and 85 percent are now renewable.

And it’s clear to anybody in the field—if you’re out there trying to build energy of one kind or another, it’s very difficult to be able to do that without recognizing, you know, what is happening in terms of costs. This revolution is going to be driven by cost, particularly at a moment where affordability is on the table the way it is now. And let me just give you an indicator. In Alabama, Louisiana, Florida, Texas, California, in parts of them, insurance companies are pulling out. They’re not going to insure. And people are getting letters from their insurance companies saying, here’s what’s happened to your premium because we have to pay for these increased storms, and the increased amount of damage, and so forth.

So capital is following this trend. And in 2025, global energy investment is going to peak at about 3.3 trillion (dollars), two-thirds of which is going towards renewables. For the first time in history, fossil fuel was outgunned by renewable investment two to one, 2.1 trillion to 1 trillion (dollars). And that’s going to continue, if you talk to the IEA or others who are prognosticating about where we’re going in terms of energy. So you got to ask yourself, if that’s where the marketplace is saying so clearly—in the language of investing and innovation—then how do we now embolden global diplomacy to be able to take advantage of this and to get people to think a little more groundedly, I guess one way to say it.

So, I’ve been asked a number of times as I travel around, people say, well, if the market is doing it anyways, do we need summits? Do we need country commitments? Do we need policy frameworks? Do we need another COP? And the answer is, folks, simple. We do, for a lot of different reasons. It’s like the U.N. It frustrates the hell out of you, but if you didn’t have it you’d have to invent it. Because there are things you have to, you know, work out with other countries. The world just doesn’t work otherwise. And, contrary to folks who argue about the United States separating itself from all of these other efforts, the truth is that that doesn’t strengthen our country.

And what has happened globally in this now non-unipolar world is exactly what the United States and many of the people in the portraits around this building wanted to do ever since World War II ended. And almost everything we’ve done diplomatically then has been to try to adhere to a set of values and standards which excite people in terms of ideas and the possibilities the future of what it means for other countries. You look at Japan. You look at Germany, great examples of the Marshall Plan and of all of the U.S. efforts post-war. And you see the most incredible living example of very powerful two democracies and very powerful two economies. That’s what we set out to do.

And we should now not complain about it, or start arguing somehow there’s a better world out there that ignores the rest of the world. Not going to happen. I think every one of you is part of this institution because you know that and you believe that inherently. But we haven’t been fighting for it. We haven’t been out there clear enough to the American people about how this affects them and how it affects the prices that are now driving them nuts and feeling that nobody is in control, and they’re paying the price they can’t afford to pay. And they are. So I’m not going to go into tariffs. I think everybody here understands what Ronald Reagan said, that, you know, a tariff is a tax. And you move on from there. But it obviously has profound downstream impacts on cost of living for people, because somebody pays that bill. And you all know who ain’t doing it.

So it seems to me—and I’ll just wrap up very quickly because I want to make the opening comments to get the questions—the COP in Belém has an opportunity to be able to perhaps move things forward a little bit. I can’t tell you that I have confidence that it’s going to do what we did in Dubai. And, for my money, having been at this for quite a few years, Dubai was the strongest agreement we ever had anywhere, building on the Paris agreement, which required people to do something. In Dubai, we said—with all 195 countries—195, 200 countries signing on—or at least not blocking, which is a big deal, believe me. I can tell you how close it has come to disaster on many occasions. And we have to backtrack on some terminology. Not true of Dubai.

So Dubai we said, all of us, we have to transition away from fossil fuel according to the science, which means 1.5, in order to achieve net zero by 2050 in a way that is just and equitable, which is how you deal with island states and less-developing countries. And finally, most importantly, accelerating in this decade. That’s the language, paragraph twenty-eight. Well, we ain’t doing it. People aren’t doing it. They’re going the other way. Emissions up. Damage up. Costs to communities up. It just doesn’t make sense. You could label it any number of things, including insane, but it’s where we are. So we have no right to complain unless we start fighting back with common sense about the opportunities in the economy to build out.

This is going to grow even more with AI, but you can’t do AI—you know, you can’t have the power you need for AI if you’re not rapidly deploying renewables. Nobody’s going to win this fight in a way that will be satisfactory to anybody unless we are proving to ourselves that we’re—that the price is something the marketplace needs to take advantage of. So I encourage everybody here to think about how we will do that in these ensuing months. And if so, we can really change where the world is going.

Last thing I’ll say, Vijay. I had the privilege of leading our negotiations in Paris, in Glasgow, in Sharm El-Sheikh, and in Dubai. So I’ve been through the trends. And I was there in 1997 when we did Kyoto. And I was there in 1992 when we started this journey with President George H.W. Bush helping to lead the charge. That’s what we’ve got to get back to. And we have to get back there on basic arguments of economics and common sense, costs. And we win on price, because you can’t build an AI data center fast enough to win the fight unless you have renewables at a major level. And that’s what they’re doing in Texas right now. Texas is proving the case.

They’ve got more wind deployed in Texas, Republican governor, two Republican senators. And they’re not going to change that. And they’re going to continue to deploy wind because that’s how they ameliorate the prices and that’s how they make the whole thing work. So, folks, we can win. That’s point I want to make. Not the politics that win. We can win for the country and the basic policy here if we will do the things we said we’re going to do, recognizing it’s good economics—it’s great economics. It’s great for the health of our citizens. And it will provide us with stronger security. Those are the three bedrock arguments on which we need to organize the climate fight.

Vijay. (Applause.)

VAITHEESWARAN: (Off mic)—Kerry, you’ve always been a master at clutching hope out of the mouths of despair. So I think you gave us a perspective on how, at a time of challenges, certainly, on the global stage, you see a path forward for climate action. We’ll just spend a minute on what comes out of the current moment in Belém, because this is topical, but I really want to move forward to some of the points you talked about in terms of innovation and how the U.S. can win, as you put it. What would you like to see coming out of this current—

KERRY: How we all win.

VAITHEESWARAN: Hmm?

KERRY: How we all win.

VAITHEESWARAN: Yes, sure, of course. But we’ll talk about that in a moment. But what comes next? What would you like to see as momentum coming out of this challenging COP, I think that’s fair to say? In the next couple of years, what needs to happen to get to the next point?

KERRY: What needs to happen, which is going to be extremely difficult, in terms of really getting to the next point, is that Belém finds a way—which I’m not convinced they will—to resolve the deficit of the NDCs. The nationally determined contributions, I mean, China’s at 7 to 10 percent between now and 2030. That just doesn’t cut it. Now China is—you know, doesn’t implement global policy in ways that we do or others do. It’s different, obviously. And so I spent eight years negotiating with China, in the last years, eight years as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and then as the global envoy and the secretary of state. In fact, I went over there and met with President Xi within about six weeks of being secretary, in order to change the equation specifically. And President Obama bought into this notion, obviously, or I wouldn’t have gone.

And that was that you can’t really make anything happen if China isn’t on board. So we got President Xi to agree—at first very tentative, very difficult, because they didn’t trust us and they were uncertain of where they wanted to go. And they hadn’t really fought out the climate issue on a public stage at all, and they’re very shy about putting down a marker where they don’t know exactly where it’s going to go and what they’re going to be able to accomplish. So we spent a year working on our NDCs. And indeed, one year after we started President Xi and President Obama stood up in the Great Hall of the People and together announced what we were going to do in Paris. That’s how Paris happened, folks, to be blunt with you. Nobody could run for cover after China and the G-77 had to act. So—

VAITHEESWARAN: But, if I may, I mean, that was a crowning moment for your climate diplomacy, is the foundation stone of the Paris agreement and how it was reached—that bringing together these two great superpowers, the two largest polluters, on climate pollution, with China obviously surpassing the U.S. in recent decades. But that world, I would put to you, no longer exists. At least, in the short to medium term we’re in a different kind of world. It’s hard to envision that kind of a meeting on climate topics these days. Can you give us one pointer, given your years of experience, decades, on how to navigate that competition, really, which is where we are with China on the global stage, where the U.S. is playing a different role? We’ve taken our toys and left the game, right, left the pitch. So how does this move forward? And to the point—bring us back to that set of arguments that sounded like a bit of a flywheel of optimism you were presenting to us. How do you get from here to there.

KERRY: Well, I still—now, I still have some optimism. And Xie Zhenhua is and I, he’s my counterpart in China, we’ve known each other for twenty-five, thirty years now. And we are genuine friends. And we talk about everything when we’re together, not just the job and so forth. And he’s prepared. He’s going to be operating with Tsinghua University as his sort of, you know, banner. And I’m doing some work through Carnegie, but also through Yale University. And we are going to try to, you know, have an influence on what both countries are thinking about climate.

The key to the climate was—and I was there when President Biden spoke to President Xi about it—and said, look, this is a universal issue. This is not a—this is not a, you know, bilateral issue. And we need to deal with this because if China and the United States do, things happen. And that’s exactly what happened. In Glasgow we came up with a memo that laid out a pathway to raise the NDC ambitions. And China said, well, we can’t change the target, but we can do things that will make a difference. That’s what China does. That’s what I think they’re doing now.

They haven’t changed their 2060, target. They haven’t changed their peaking target. But I’ll tell you this, I bet anything on it, they’ve peaked. They’re going to go down, because China is now—after six, eight years of building up to this—China is the biggest manufacturer and deployer of renewables in the entire world, indeed more than all of the rest of the world put together. Think about that. Unbelievable, what they’re doing. And so I think, you know, without announcing a change in their target, by virtue of the amount of renewables they’re deploying, and less coal they’re depending on—even though they built some additional coal, which is horrible to see—but that additional coal I don’t think is going to get lit up. I think it’s their hedge against an economy imploding because they have blackouts. They live in fear of it. So my personal judgment is that China is going to be ahead of us even in reductions of emissions, because ours are going up, because of the rate at which they’re deploying renewables.

VAITHEESWARAN: Well, let’s pick up on that point. You know, you made a case for how and why China may be peaking on emissions. And, of course, the point about the clean technologies. The most recent cover in the Economist a week ago took this up with a ten-page special report really digging into this from my colleagues who are based in China. And our argument is that, in fact, though there are security issues and economic issues raised—and supply chain issues raised by China’s extraordinary expansion—solar, wind, batteries, electric vehicles, and so on—this is a gift to the planet.

This is something that—it doesn’t matter to the atmosphere where the cuts are made. And developing countries—Pakistan, extraordinary expansion in solar, the Sun Belt countries, all on the back of inexpensive Chinese technology. This actually, while great for reducing the trajectory of atmospheric emissions, poses that challenge back to the U.S. And this is where I want to take the conversation with the time you and I have on stage. What is the opportunity for the U.S. to respond through innovation, something you talked about a little bit on stage?

I want to flag up for our audience here, those here and virtually, there is a new report issued today by the Council that I recommend to you very highly, the Global Energy Innovation Index. You’ll see a precis of it outside. The full report is online, of course. And for those online, you’ll find a link as well. And it ranks the top countries on their innovation competitiveness. Led by a team by David Hart, who’s an expert in this area. And among the other things—I’ll just tease one result—the top ten does not include the U.S. or China. And so—and this is a multifactorial analysis looking, including, both at invention, but also policies, deployment. A very thoughtful way of doing it.

So, Secretary Kerry, without having had the benefit of reading the report, and I know you haven’t, the idea that America has some room to go, as indeed does China on innovation—on climate tech innovation, energy innovation—where would you—what levers would you press, if you could, to help America in this challenge? As you say, everyone will win when clean energies flourish, I presume is your thesis. But what you said before, what does America need to do, particularly, to do better?

KERRY: Well, I mean, America—(laughs)—do I separate “America” from the administration? (Laughter.)

VAITHEESWARAN: America’s been around 250 years, so let’s start with that. Let’s try. If you can.

KERRY: America, because—well, there’s certain things that just aren’t—well, there’s certain things that just aren’t going to happen. I can sit here and say, here’s what we ought to be doing. It’s not going to happen for a period of time. The private sector is going to continue to move. And the private sector is going to do it because they see alpha, money. You’re going to be able to make money. And because the marketplace globally is moving exactly in the way you described. Because Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, you know, and many other countries, Laos, Cambodia and places, desperately need electricity. They desperately need deployment. There’s a huge market out there, folks.

I mean, the energy market is the largest market the world has ever known, ever. And it’s bigger than the Industrial Revolution, because we have to redo everything. We have to do grids. We don’t even have a grid in the United States, by the way. You know, we got an East Coast thing and a West Coast thing, and then Texas has its own thing.

VAITHEESWARAN: Texas has its own thing, ERCOT, right, yeah.

KERRY: You got it. Absolutely. And we can’t send an electron from New York to California. That’s insane in this day and age. And so, how do we get our—

VAITHEESWARAN: Let’s upgrade the grid, right?

KERRY: Well, let me finish. How do we—how do we get our act together to do those things?

VAITHEESWARAN: Right. Yeah.

KERRY: Politics. That’s, unfortunately, what it comes down to. You have to win elections. If you don’t win elections, you don’t have people in power who want to do something, it isn’t going to happen. And there are far too many chokepoints. You know, we were hopeful we were going to get permitting reform before I left the job.

VAITHEESWARAN: Right. Joe Manchin is still sore about that, but go on.

KERRY: Well, we should have done it. It’s insane not to have done it. And that’s another thing. We can’t send an electron across state lines because of politics. People get in the way. You know, they want their market share. They don’t want any disruption in it. They don’t want to compete for it, certainly. I can tell you, in twenty-eight years in the United States Senate, you’d be amazed at how many CEOs came into me and asked me to join in legislating their monopoly, even though they were, quote, conservatives and didn’t believe in—(laughs)—you know, seriously. It does come down to having an idea that wins. The idea that should win right now is all across this country we are in a race with respect to AI.

China, let me just—I made a note of this just before I came in here. China’s target by 2025, end of this year, is 300 EFLOPS. That’s the measurement of supercomputing power output, et cetera. And ability to gage one quintillion floating points of operations, which is how it all works—how the models work. And they’ve got something, like, 300 models at this point in time of major language capacity. So China has a strategy to be able to win in the fight. We actually don’t. Despite what has been said, we’re undoing IRA. We’re undoing the incentives. It won’t happen all at once. It’ll go till 2028, or so, and so there’ll be an election, and, you know, a different president.

So things can change here. But for the moment we need to fuel the playing field so that companies can actually follow through on the plans that they have. Look at the windfarm up in—

VAITHEESWARAN: But, just to stick to the point about AI, I mean, clearly there’s enthusiasm in Washington for AI. It’s one of the main areas that we’ve seen regulatory—a deregulatory push from the government in power now. And we’ve seen some efforts to unleash nuclear power, for example, as one of the potential energy sources, fast-tracking permitting. So there is desire to clear the track for AI.

KERRY: Some places.

VAITHEESWARAN: Presumably, you would argue that you need all of the above—not just certain kinds of energy, but as well clean energy.

KERRY: Look, I am absolutely not a doomsday or even close to a doomsday person. And that’s part of where the whole debate went awry. Because people were arguing—people were arguing morality over materiality. And I know the Council has sort of been wrestling with some of the terminology in what we do. We need materiality, not morality. We’re not going to win on that argument. We just—because that’s not where Americans live day to day, particularly now with the affordability problem. So you’ve got to—you’ve got to come at them with price. It’s cheaper, folks. It is cheaper to have electricity from renewables. And now batteries, with the sodium ion batteries, the batteries are getting better and better. So there are—like, UAE, which is an oil and gas producing country, has just finished four nuclear reactors that are now online. They have a huge solar field, one of the biggest in the world, they’re playing out. And they’re investing in renewables and alternatives and so forth, because they know that’s ultimately the future.

VAITHEESWARAN: And the world’s largest battery—

KERRY: And the world’s largest battery, nineteen gigawatts of battery reserve in order to be able to prove they can provide what’s called firm energy on demand. The minute that happens, folks, with those three entities—with wind, solar, battery storage, it’s Katie bar the door. We win. But there’s also—on pricing, the price of those deployments of wind or solar are going to be really measurable. And there are no—there are no hidden costs. On the other hand, if I can just finish one thought, coal, which is still too preeminent. Coal, nobody considers the cost of black lung disease. Nobody considers the sludge that that kills rivers, lakes, streams. Nobody considers the impact on COPD, on heart disease, all these other things. If you were to really tally up what coal does to our planet, it’s multiple times more expensive than doing—

VAITHEESWARAN: Sure, when you do the full accounting. And it’s not just an—

KERRY: Well, we ought to be able to sell that.

VAITHEESWARAN: Well, even in China, you know, I was the Shanghai bureau chief for the Economist for a number of years. And even in China, which is abundant in coal, they started to move away from coal because of the human health cost and the political cost. People demanded to know, what is the PM 2.5. That is the pollution levels. It became a salient political issue for the Communist Party, which is how they began the push.

KERRY: And the biggest—the biggest exhibitor of the effect of the air was the American Embassy in Beijing.

VAITHEESWARAN: Absolutely.

KERRY: Every day the American Embassy would put out—

VAITHEESWARAN: They used to tweet out. And they used to really piss off the Chinese, by the way, by doing that. So more power to them for having done it.

But where I want to go with this, a last point, and that is, you know, the great Wayne Gretzky once said that—you know, when asked his secret to his success, he said, I skate to where the puck is going to be. And with that in mind, rather than try to chase China on the cheapest solar—although nothing wrong with adopting and diffusing innovation, that’s a big part of victory in innovation—where should the U.S. be skating to on this question of energy, climate innovation? What’s next, in your view?

KERRY: Well, next is here. And that’s AI. And AI is going to change everything about everything. I mean, white collar jobs in America will diminish before a lot of other kinds of jobs. You don’t need code writers as much anymore. Code’s getting written by the other AI models. And equally importantly, AI, we’re invested in a company that’s going to have the ability to be able to create virtual power plants where you actually manage through software the distribution of the energy. Do that, folks, and you don’t have to build the next combined cycle gas-fired power plant. Moreover, it takes five years right now. It’s four to five years’ waiting period to get a combined cycle gas turbine. So if you want to build your AI center and get it up and competitive in the next year or two, which people want to do to win against China—

VAITHEESWARAN: But you’ve got all those Nvidia chips sitting around. You can’t have them—in three years they’re worthless, right? So you need the power sooner.

KERRY: There you go. Absolutely. And that’s what—

VAITHEESWARAN: Speed to power, as they call it.

KERRY: Speed to power.

VAITHEESWARAN: Renewables win on speed to power. OK. I have—I’m out of time for me to ask questions. It’s good news for all of you, because now it’s your turn. Please, let’s have some excellent questions. As ever, identify yourself and your affiliation. And please remember this is on the record. We’ll take some questions from here and then we’ll, of course, as questions pop up on the Zoom I’ll attend to our online audience as well. Do we have—let’s go to the gentleman there, if we can get a microphone. I saw you first, sir. Identify yourself and make it a good question.

Q: I’ll do my best. Scott Moore, University of Pennsylvania.

I had the honor of serving at the State Department when you were secretary. So pleasure to be here. The question is about subnational action. The first Trump administration, of course, we saw a turn to subnational action as sort of the face of U.S. involvement in multilateral. Gavin Newsom, obviously, was probably the most visible U.S. presence at this COP so far. How do you rate subnational action as a kind of way to maintain continuity or engagement during this period of federal disinvolvement?

KERRY: Huge. Huge.

VAITHEESWARAN: I’m shocked by the short answer—(laughter)—but I have to—you know, not to say you give long-winded answers. I would never say that publicly. But one more sentence, please, on why it’s—

KERRY: Privately you would, right? (Laughter.) Yeah. Well, at the end of—at the end of Donald Trump’s first term—and this is not about Trump. This is not just policy writ large. But at the end of his term, 75 percent of the electricity produced, the new electricity that came online in America, came from renewables. And one of the reasons for that was governors, Republican and Democrats alike, lived under what’s called the portfolio—renewable portfolio law, which required X amount of deployment of renewables. And they lived by it. And we started a movement. I stood up right here in New York with then-Governor Cuomo, Governor Newsom—there was one other governor—oh, Governor Inslee. And we announced the We’re Still In movement. And that had a profound impact, folks.

So the answer is, right now it’s 90 percent of the new electricity in America. And remember the figures I just gave you. Eight-five percent globally of the new electricity is now coming from renewables. I’ll tell you, this is a bottom-line prediction, this I do believe—and the Wall Street Journal had this story about two months ago. Headline, The Energy Transition is Now Unstoppable. Now, there are some people who think that’s—I think it absolutely is. The power of the marketplace, the trillions that are now beginning to mass, the commitments—people are going to do this. Why? Because they have to do it. Because you saw what happened to—you know, you saw what happened to Jamaica. You see what happened in California. You see what’s happening around the world. There is a—everything we are doing, those of us advocating for this, does not come out of any ideology, any party, any philosophy. It comes out of physics, science. This is about physics, about, you know, long wave versus short wave, Sun sent to the earth, it can’t get back out because of this film of chemicals.

VAITHEESWARAN: It’s because people see opportunity, that’s where you’re going with this, from the bottom up.

KERRY: People see more than opportunity. I think people see it as inevitable in every respect. It’s the way they’re going to preserve their habitats, the way they’re going to stay alive, it’s the way they pass something on to their kids.

VAITHEESWARAN: I’ll do the Journal one better. They might say the transition is unstoppable. I’d say, the age of big climate is over. The action is going to come from the bottom up, and including in resilience.

Let’s go to this gentleman for a question in the front row, and we’ll see if we have any—

Q: Thank you, Secretary Kerry. Great to see you Jay Koh. I’m from The Lightsmith Group. We focus on adaptation and investing.

And one of the big initiatives that came out of the Biden administration was the PREPARE strategy. And, broadly, that’s one of the achievements, I think, of the Paris activity, which is to focus also on adaptation/resilience. It feels like adaptation/resilience is finally having a moment, not just on the risk and downside but also investors beginning to look at this. McKinsey, BCG, Bain, all describing this as a trillions of dollars potential investment area. It has the kind of dollars-and-cents discussion that you’re talking about here as a theme. I’m just wondering if you can comment on what you think the opportunity is for adaptation/resilience as part of the climate tech story and the investment opportunity story.

KERRY: I think adaptation is up there equally with resilience and with mitigation. And that’s the way we’re going to make it work. And bottom line is, if there’s a revenue stream attached to whatever the project or enterprise is, you can fund it, and it can happen, and you can make money. If you don’t have money, it’s tougher. The bottom line is that—but we’re not doing anything that’s concessionary. We’re not doing anything that’s subsidized, for the simple reason we want to prove to people that, on the basics of economics, the basic of a judgment about a deal, you can have a terrific outlying source. And let me tell you just quickly a couple things.

We’re invested in a company called Fervo. Some of you may have heard of it, I don’t know. It’s geothermal. They built a prototype—not a prototype—they built a pilot project in Utah—excuse me—in Nevada. And now the prototype is being built in Utah. And they’ll be producing electricity shortly, in a year or so. It’s 100 percent, it comes out of the earth. A certain amount of—85 percent of the employees are employees who came out of oil and gas extraction industry. And they’re using techniques that were used for fracking to now be able to get the heat out of the earth at levels. And they’re going down 10,000 feet. They’re going down 5,000, drilling horizontally. And this is going to be—that’s a way you have absolute emission-free production of an AI data center. So—

VAITHEESWARAN: Secretary Kerry, I have to thank you because you’ve perfectly teed up promotion for a major package the Economist is publishing tomorrow on next-generation geothermal, for which I went out to Utah to the—he didn’t know this—to the Fervo project that’s been—

KERRY: See, it’s happening, folks! (Laughter.)

VAITHEESWARAN: It’s happening, folks. If the Economist says it’s happening, it’s happening. You can see it all tomorrow. It’s really an extraordinary transformation and example of American climate leadership. It really is American leadership, with startup companies and sort of the best of risk capital meeting oil and gas. This is green fracking. Some people aren’t going to like it. In New York State, we don’t love fracking. But we’re going to fall behind if we don’t follow the opportunity of extending a kind of green energy that’s got three benefits. It’s clean emissions, but it’s also twenty-four/seven firm power, as it’s called. And it can—you can even use it for energy storage, long duration. So encourage you to check, certainly, the package out.

KERRY: This is why we’re going to win. I’m not kidding, folks.

VAITHEESWARAN: But this point is well taken.

KERRY: This is why I believe we can win.

VAITHEESWARAN: Let’s go to our questioner online.

OPERATOR: We will take our next question from Anatoly Chubays.

VAITHEESWARAN: All right then.

Q: Hello. Can you hear me?

KERRY: Yes, we can hear you.

Q: I’m Anatoly Chubays. My current position is chairman of the Russian Study Center in Tel Aviv University, but my previous job was the Russian president’s special envoy on climate and sustainability.

And I do remember, Mr. Kerry, your successful visit to Russia in 2021, which really helps Russia to focus its climate policy. But that was four years ago. A lot has happened since that time. (Laughs.) And if we will look from today’s position, I understand that you are separating the America and the American administration. But anyway, as we know, the President Trump officially withdraw United States from the Paris agreement. And he called the Paris agreement “unfair,” “draconian,” “bad deal for America.” And if we go to Russia, unfortunately, I must admit that there is no real climate policy.

VAITHEESWARAN: Chubays, we’re honored to have you with us, but your question, please.

Q: Yeah. So my question, with this position of United States, which is number two global emitter, and Russia, which is number four global emitter, do you believe that it will not undermine the global sustainable policy and still have a chance to achieve zero emission by 2050?

KERRY: I’m not sure I understand the Russia part of that question, but maybe it isn’t there. I think that—I think, first of all, I mean, Russia is way behind everybody else, and has barely taken part, unfortunately, you know, in the efforts to create alternative renewable energy sources, and to move away from gas, and so forth. And obviously what’s happening with the war in Ukraine is an environmental disaster of huge proportions. So I think I would welcome Russia, you know, trying to come to the table on several of these issues. I spent a lot of time with President Putin, and more than anybody else in the Obama administration. Long, long meetings. And we were, obviously, very focused on Syria and ISIS and other things. But Russia cooperated with us in getting chemical weapons out of Syria in the middle of a war. And Russia played a very big role in doing that cooperation.

So I’m somebody who believes good diplomacy can result in conversations, even when things are tough. And I would love to see us engage in more robust efforts with Russia on a broader array of issues, including the southern ocean, where we—where we want to try to create a massive addition to the largest marine protected area in the world, the Ross Sea. And Russia is, unfortunately, opposing it. So I would hope you would do anything you can to open up the door for real dialogue here in the way that we had it very recently, and very productively. We stopped Ebola in its tracks in West Africa. Russia helped, China helped.

So I’m a—I am a deep believer in the power and possibility of good diplomacy to change the way you currently see things. And so I don’t look at it and say, well, the way it is today is the way it has to be, and it’s going to be. That’s not true. And if you engage where you don’t think there’s necessarily a possibility but you have a good idea of how you can build trust and how you can do things that are constructive for both or multiple countries, you can—you can make things happen. And I hope you would be part of efforts in Russia to get people to remember that.

VAITHEESWARAN: Thank you. Let’s go to a question here. There’s a lady there.

Q: Hi. Thank you so much for this conversation. My name is Swati and I work with UNICEF. So my question is very health and climate centric.

The two don’t always align. So I wanted to get your thoughts more on what good transition plans actually look like. We know right now that about 500,000 newborns die every year and it’s attributable to household pollution—that’s biomass fuels being burned in low- and middle-income countries. And for them, the next feasible step in the energy ladder often is LPG. And so I feel like I don’t really hear a lot of that conversation or nuance at COPs, where a lot of these countries desperately need to move away from biomass—from wood, from coal—but often maybe are being held to the standards of these Western countries that make up the top twenty of this innovation index, but don’t have the same resources.

KERRY: Sure. So let me be very, very blunt with you and with myself. I’m not a fan of talk-fests. And from Paris through Dubai, we didn’t just produce talk-fests. We produced a roadmap. We produced an agreed-upon agenda. And people aren’t following it. I mean, if they’re not following it, you have to find a way to pressure and make—you know, bring people around. But we don’t have any credibility in that field anymore. We’re not in it. We’re not even at the table. And we have no credibility with which to say to them, well, if you don’t do this we’re going to try to push a countervailing, you know, CBAM measure—you’re all familiar with CBAM—with the, you know, countervailing carbon-based surcharges on people. And Europe’s thinking about deploying one now. You know, China has a marketplace for carbon. California has a marketplace for carbon.

The biggest and best thing we could do to win this battle, actually, is pass an agreed upon, real price of carbon globally. The minute you do that, marketplace changes, it’s gone. You know, we’re going to win. I say that because I know, because I led the fight to do acid rain back in the 1980s when I was lieutenant governor, and then when I was a senator. And we won the fight. You don’t hear about acid rain. Why? Because it went away as a problem because sulfur was priced. There was a trading mechanism. And it won the day. So if we could get something like that cooking, we’d have a chance of, again, winning the battle.

VAITHEESWARAN: And back in the day, it was a Republican president who signed it into law. It was a market-based mechanism.

KERRY: It was a market-based mechanism, which was designed, frankly, by the Heritage Foundation. And we kind of borrowed with them and worked with them. And I had Governor John Sununu of New Hampshire was my, you know, Republican counterpart, and Dick Celeste from Ohio. And we put together this solution, which ultimately I helped get into the Clean Air Act when I was in the Senate. So things make a difference. You have to talk to each other to make those things happen. You have to go across borders, state lines, country lines, whatever. You’ve got to have deployment. But you’ve got to have real things that are happening now.

And right now what burns me up more than anything is people are not conscientiously making the kind of efforts—there are a few people who are. Don’t get me wrong. Mostly European countries. And the Europeans are leading on the innovation index that Vijay just mentioned. So you have to keep pounding away, folks. You know what? Winston Churchill once was asked something about America, whether they’d come around to do the war—you know, fight the war, help and everything. And he said, confidently—he said, you know, America will do the right thing, after they’ve exhausted every other option. (Laughter.)

VAITHEESWARAN: We’re working on the latter part right now. Let’s go for a question here, this gentleman.

Q: Tyler Godoff, Emerging Founder Advisory.

So you mentioned you’re now fifty-five years old. You’ve been on this journey for a while now. With hindsight, knowing what you know now, how would you have changed your strategy trying to achieve the goals that you’ve achieved and are trying to achieve on this front?

KERRY: How would I have changed?

Q: Yes. Knowing what you know now, what strategy shifts would you have personally made going back—

KERRY: Well, I would have—I would have shifted some strategy and made sure that my campaign was adequately answering the lies that were thrown at us and won the presidency. That would be a good start. (Laughter.)

VAITHEESWARAN: Let’s go to the back row here. I’ve ignored the back. Maybe we’ll go to the lady over there in the red.

Q: Thank you. Thank you very much. My name is Lili Pike. I’m a reporter with Bloomberg News. I cover climate change and China. And thank you for citing my colleagues’ work earlier.

My question is going back to what you said about China filling the vacuum right now. I’m curious, is China currently meeting your definition of climate leadership on the global stage? And if not, why not? Thanks.

KERRY: No. They’re not. And I don’t think they will in the near term very easily. For the same reasons that I think Belt and Road has been a very troubled program. I think that—I want to be—I want to—look, I’m trying to find the right—the right structure here. China is different. It’s just different, culturally, economically, and otherwise. They make a decision. Everybody gets on board. They can make it in two days. They can make it in one day, if they want to. And they move. We can’t do that. We don’t do that. And I’m not advocating that we should do that, because the methodologies that they’re doing that are not something that Americans want to live with. And I would never even think of that. It would be counter to America.

But they get things done. Eight years ago they were nowhere near being able to produce the kind of massive levels of solar panels that they are today. And mind you, also, those solar panels capacity came from Germany and the United States. It was literally stolen from us in the context of trade. And nobody did anything about it at the WTO. And the rest is history. So we lose out. Now, we can’t sit around crying about it, and, oh, whining. We got to get to work. And the way we get to work is focus on the supply chains that are going to make the greatest difference to us right now to be able to lead. And, frankly, to sit down with China.

Now, I know that’s heresy in a lot of places. Everybody says, oh, no, no, you know? I mean, Congresspeople are tripping over each other to see who can be more, you know, bellicose in talking about China. But I just don’t agree with that as an approach. And I think everything I’ve done with China has proven otherwise. That is not the only way to get things done. And we might find that there’s a very different course of possibilities if we were to work in a sincere way of dealing with other things. Now, that’s—mind you, there are a bunch of things that are problematic in terms of what—how China behaves. I mean, you’ve got challenges galore, ranging from access to the marketplace, theft of intellectual property, Uyghurs, Taiwan, nuclear weapons, nine-dash line in the—you know, in the South China Sea—

VAITHEESWARAN: It’s going to be hard to climb out of that hole to be optimistic, Secretary Kerry. (Laughter.)

KERRY: No, I disagree. Because that’s the way life is, folks. I mean, there’s nothing we’re presented with today that hasn’t been presented in a slightly different form to another generation. You know, every one of the problems we face are caused by human beings. And they’re caused by human beings in how they interpret other people’s politics, other people’s strategy, and other people’s culture, and so forth. And you can get stuck there. And I think, you know, the art is to sort of find the way you can get commonality and break out of there.

I’ll give you a commonality suggestion. If we just have a race with China for AI, what Putin said is that whoever controls AI is going to be able to control the world. That’s Putin’s view. And Xi has not said something like that, but he said that China is going to lead the world in AI. And I don’t know how many of you read Tom Friedman’s article in the New York Times maybe six weeks ago, two months ago. Brilliant article, in my judgment. Really crafted carefully word for word, important, a huge message. And the bottom line was, if we don’t sit down with China and work out the guardrails and the rules of the road for AI, we are all asking for potential cataclysmic disaster.

We lived through this in the post-war world, post-World War II. And we had a constant struggle with the Soviet Union on who was going to develop the next weapon. And if you looked at the history—and it’s worth going back and tracking it—you look at the history of the arms race, beginning with us dropping an atomic bomb. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have. I think it was the right thing to do and I’ve supported that. But we did it. Then came the hydrogen. Then came, I think—

VAITHEESWARAN: Secretary, we’re just out of time. So the punch line here is—what I hear you bringing us to is, while you emphasize that there is a great competition, a great race, it is, of course, useful to remember the value of cooperation as well on the great powers on the great questions of our age.

KERRY: But there’s something that’s a little more than that. It’s not just the power of cooperation. It’s the imperative, in this case.

VAITHEESWARAN: Right.

KERRY: Imperative.

VAITHEESWARAN: Imperative.

KERRY: And how do we get to that imperative?

VAITHEESWARAN: Thank you.

We are out of time. And I will draw this meeting to a close, reminding all of us that this was on the record. I thank all of you for joining us online as well as here. This will be posted online. Please give Secretary Kerry a nice round of applause for joining us. (Applause.)

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.