[ad_1]
WASHINGTON: John Kerry, one of the main architects of the Paris climate agreement, has one more chance to lead the fight against climate change after President-elect Joe Biden appointed veteran senator and former secretary of state climate envoy for national security .
Biden’s team gave few immediate details on Monday (November 23) about how it envisioned Kerry shaping the new job, which many on social media and on all sides of the climate action spectrum were quick to call the “czar of the weather”. But the transition team made it clear that it will be a prominent role, and Kerry will become the first member of the National Security Council to focus exclusively on climate change.
It was one of Biden’s first steps in delivering on campaign promises to tackle climate damage from fossil fuel emissions more comprehensively and forcefully than any previous American administration. And it’s a sign of how the incoming administration is heeding warnings that natural disasters triggered by global warming will weaken America’s defense and generate conflict around the world.
“America will soon have a government that treats the climate crisis as the urgent threat to national security that it is,” Kerry tweeted. “I am proud to partner with the president-elect, our allies and the young leaders of the climate movement to address this crisis as the president’s climate envoy.”
At 76, Kerry has the stature to help him make deals with foreign governments about global climate efforts. But he is half a century or more than the activists who brought climate change to the forefront of national politics for the past four years.
Varshini Prakash, the executive director of the climate group Sunrise Movement, whose members are younger, called the appointment a “very good move” and said Kerry combined a long history on climate issues with a commitment to “engage and listen to the voices of Young”. “But Prakash called on Biden to go further and create a new national federal office to push agencies on climate efforts.
READ: Biden appoints team to direct US foreign policy, Michigan certifies Biden’s victory
The incoming administration’s move comes after four years in which President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accord, promoted more climate-damaging oil and gas drilling and coal mining, and consistently dismantled the Obama administration efforts to control fossils. fuel emissions.
Biden has vowed to bring the United States back to the Paris climate agreement. After the 2018 midterm elections in which young progressives like New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez managed to push climate change to the forefront of the United States political agenda, Biden in his presidential race promised a plan to $ 2 trillion to reform the nation’s transportation and energy sectors. and buildings to curb fossil fuel emissions.
Kerry was a senator from Massachusetts, a failed Democratic presidential candidate against George W Bush in 2004, and Obama’s second secretary of state from 2013 to 2017.
In the Senate, Kerry in 2010 was one of the main authors of one of the largest legislative efforts to date by Congress to limit fossil fuel emissions. Failure.
Kerry’s former Democratic colleagues in Congress praised his appointment.
Kerry brings “diplomatic and political experience” and “knows better than anyone how to ensure that this crisis receives much-needed international attention,” said Senator Tom Carper of Delaware, the top Democrat on the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works.
READ: Biden’s choice for UN envoy will find a decline in American influence
READ: Biden elects Cuban-American lawyer Mayorkas as US national security chief.
Brett Hartl, director of government affairs for the environmental advocacy group at the Center for Biological Diversity, welcomed the incoming Biden administration’s decision on Kerry.
But “it’s important somewhere in the Biden administration,” particularly on the weather, to see “not just the same people and actors that we’ve seen before on these issues,” Hartl said.
Other environmental advocates, some of whom want the United States to move away from all fossil fuels in a few years, were more severe. Wenonah Hauter of Food and Water Action said Kerry’s record was too tepid on limiting fossil fuels. “The Kerry proposals are tired ideas from years past that will do little or nothing to address our climate crisis,” Hauter said in a statement.
The US military has warned in a series of reports that climate change is a security threat on many fronts. That includes “through direct impacts on the United States military infrastructure and by affecting factors, including the availability of food and water, that can exacerbate conflict outside the borders of the United States,” said the most recent climate report and gloomy of the federal government.
