US special climate envoy John Kerry praised China’s climate commitments and emphasised the importance of personal relationships in diplomacy during his farewell tour of Washington.
Kerry is leaving his cabinet-level position on Wednesday after three years, but said on Tuesday that he was not leaving the climate fight. Instead, he will remain “deeply involved” and redirect his attention to mobilising private capital to help the clean energy transition.
He also said he hoped he and his former Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua would continue to talk.
Kerry – a former secretary of state, senator and Democratic presidential nominee – made his mark in recent years by engaging Beijing on climate at a time of tense relations. The bilateral climate agreement reached at Sunnylands in November before the US and Chinese leaders’ summit helped catalyse the unprecedented “Dubai consensus” between nearly 200 countries to transition away from fossil fuels.
According to Kerry, Xie, who retired this year at 74, will continue working through his alma mater, Tsinghua University. Kerry, 80, plans to stay involved through his own alma mater, Yale University, which he said would hopefully allow him to keep talking with Xie.
“We’re going to try to see if we can stay together as ‘citizens emeritus’ and do some constructive work,” he said on Tuesday, noting that he has had transition talks with his and Xie’s successors, John Podesta and Liu Zhenmin.
Kerry and Xie are known for their close personal relationship forged over almost two decades – one that for the most part helped transcend the ideological battles between their countries.
The effort to avert climate change, though a shared goal between the US and China, has not been immune to geopolitics. In recent years, the US has imposed duties and sanctions on Chinese solar imports because of concerns about forced labour in the supply chain and abiding compliance to tariff regimes put in place by former US presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
And in 2022, in response to then US House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, Beijing suspended a bilateral working group focused on climate.
But Kerry and Xie were key to getting talks restarted. In identical statements issued in November, Beijing and Washington revived the working group and expressed support for the global target to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030.
The world’s two biggest carbon emitters also agreed to economy-wide climate targets for 2035 and acknowledged the aim to reduce “post-peaking” absolute emissions in the 2020s for their power sectors.
Kerry praised such commitments by China on Friday, calling them “big movement forward”.
He also noted that China was the biggest producer and deployer of renewable energy, larger than the rest of the world put together.
“Relationships matter,” Kerry said on Friday, recounting negotiations with Xie that went on until “the wee hours” around the world leading up to the Sunnylands agreement.
Kerry also highlighted how Xie brought his wife and 10-year-old grandson to meet him at Cop28 in Dubai late last year. “That’s how personal they’ve got, and that’s, in my judgment, folks, how you can actually get things done,” he said.
Asked why he is leaving the world of Track 1 diplomacy despite his successes, Kerry said Tuesday that after helping set the government-level road map for climate, his logical next step is to help the private sector implement such guidelines.
Kerry added that he believes the structures he has helped set in place will sustain official US-China climate cooperation after his departure.
In any case, he will not be straying too far from official venues. “I will be at the COP, I’ll be at the [Our Ocean] Conference,” he said on Tuesday. “As a private citizen, I still expect to be deeply involved.”