Every Day Is Extra

by John Kerry

  We were seated around an enormous rectangular table, each of the sixty or so negotiators with several of their staff seated behind them in an outer ring around the table. I caught the eye of the chairperson and asked to be recognized. “I’m troubled by some of what I’ve been hearing,” I told them. I spoke, energized by all the years we had been through these arguments and by the stakes. I began by reminding people that for those of us who had been to prior COPs, this was an old debate. “It was in fact an argument that had produced nothing over the years. When we were in Kyoto we tried to have mandatory reductions in which the developed states did more than anyone, which was appropriate because they had indeed contributed more to the problem. But that crashed and burned because many countries—mine included—balked at the reality that certain states would do nothing even though they were increasingly contributing to the damage. Unless we share and all recognize responsibility, we will all unwittingly join in a suicide pact.” I then went on to the most critical point: “It was ludicrous to suggest that the agreement we are poised to adopt lacks differentiation to account for each country’s individual circumstances. The contributions we’re discussing are completely voluntary. They are determined by each nation. This agreement is actually the greatest monument to differentiation that you could imagine. Every nation decides for itself what it is willing to do and capable of doing!” We were so close. I urged the negotiators not to nitpick the agreement to death. “We are closer to something reasonable that all nations can accept than we have ever been before. Don’t let the ‘perfect’ be the enemy of the good.”

  I went back to the hotel around 2:30 a.m. The talks were continuing at the expert level, so I requested my chief of staff, Jon Finer, stay behind to help keep things on track and call me if I needed to come back. The negotiations continued until 5:00 a.m. When Jon finally returned to the hotel, he was optimistic the text would come together within the next twenty-four hours. It seemed that the delegates drifted back to the core organizing principle of the Paris Agreement: each country would define its best efforts. We would not again make ourselves prisoners of mandatory reduction targets even though we all knew the urgency argued for them.

  The next day was consumed by last-minute efforts to build consensus. It happened to be my birthday, and no one had any question about what I wanted. Minister Piyush Goyal of India, one of their chief negotiators, thoughtfully dropped by our office with a massive, tall bouquet of flowers. It was a wonderful gesture and even an indicator that we might get over our last hurdle with India. The negotiating continued into Friday night. Effectively we stopped the clock at midnight Friday and allowed ourselves to drift into Saturday. Then, around lunchtime on Saturday, December 12, the French released the final version of the agreement. As usual, we made copies, passed them around and sat quietly to review the text.

  Todd was the first one to spot the error. On page twenty-one, a sentence that was supposed to read that developed nations “should” reduce emissions by whatever amount they proposed, instead read that developed nations “shall” reduce emissions by that amount. “Should” is an ambiguous word, without legal implications for missing our target. “Shall” means that coming short of our target would be a legal violation of the agreement, and by accepting that language, we would be crossing a line with Congress, which would not agree to mandatory reductions.

  The should-for-shall swap was shocking and had to have been done purposely by someone, since we had spent ample time negotiating that very sentence—and all parties were ostensibly okay with “should” in the end. I immediately called Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, who was chairing the negotiations, and explained our alarm. He seemed genuinely surprised. He assured me he would fix the mistake immediately and look into how it happened.

  Still, as we arrived in the main conference hall around 6:00 p.m., we weren’t sure what to expect. Had other countries been briefed on the last-minute should/shall debacle? Would anyone challenge it from the floor? I quickly found Minister Xie, the lead negotiator from China, who assured me they were okay with the text. India and South Africa were comfortable as well.

  I noticed the head of the Nicaraguan delegation, Paul Oquist, at the front of the room, arguing with Fabius. Apparently, he wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to block the agreement, which he believed did not go far enough to help countries like his address the climate challenge. I talked to the Russians and Chinese and asked them to try to talk him off the ledge. They and others talked with him quietly on the side of the plenary. I then called the State Department Operations Center from my cell phone, which eventually connected me to the First Lady of Nicaragua. I explained the scene her representative was causing and softly reminded her that it would be unfortunate if Nicaragua was the only nation standing in the way of success in Paris. I don’t know whether she ended up reaching Oquist, but he ceased making a public spectacle. Shortly thereafter, Fabius grew tired of his antics and joined President Hollande and UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon onstage. He quickly explained the should/shall change to the plenary, made brief remarks about the text and said, finally, “I hear no objection.”

  With that, he banged his gavel on the podium. “The Paris climate accord is adopted.”

  I felt a swell of emotion as soon as the words left his mouth. Years of work for a lot of folks came to fruition at that moment. The floor of the plenary erupted, everyone shaking hands, hugging, offering congratulations. I looked around and saw elation on the faces of several thousand delegates and various advocates who had been laboring away for a long time. Somehow, we had done it. I posed for selfie after selfie as members of various delegations approached us. I shared congratulations with Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Al Gore, Laurent Fabius and his team, with whom we had worked so closely. Laurent had been focused and disciplined as the chair, managing many delegations with skill and good diplomacy.

  When the exuberance on the floor dulled down to a steady murmur, the chair recognized a few of us to speak to the moment. When my turn arrived, I cautioned the room that for all the accomplishment and significance of what we achieved, we needed to remind ourselves: we were not leaving Paris with a guarantee that we would hold Earth’s temperature increase to two degrees centigrade—the goal we set in the agreement. The real importance of our achievement was the message we were sending to the world’s private sector that 196 nations were now committed to move in the same direction on energy policy. That message, we hoped, would unleash a torrent of investment into sustainable, alternative and renewable energy. Why? Because the solution to climate change is energy policy, and the technology we have today could, if deployed rapidly enough, solve the crisis. We were betting on the genius of the entrepreneur to recognize that public policy was reinforcing the largest market the world has ever known, a market today of four to five billion energy users worth multitrillions of dollars, which would be growing over the next thirty years to nine billion users and worth multiples of those trillions. No burden was placed by government on anyone. It was an invitation to the marketplace to get the job done and make money doing it. That was the real success of the Paris Agreement. Paris was inviting the private sector to save us from ourselves.

  I returned to my hotel around 11:00 p.m. to scarf down a quick dinner before heading to a TV studio nearby to pretape a round of interviews with the hosts of the various Sunday news shows. It was important to define for ourselves what had been accomplished—and what had not—rather than having others do it for us. I was exhausted, but we had just concluded an agreement decades in the making. I was happy to share the good news.

  For a moment, I wondered why we couldn’t do the interviews live the following day, but then I remembered that I was scheduled to be on my way to Rome at 7:00 a.m. for meetings on the deteriorating political situation in Libya. From there, it was on to Moscow to discuss Syria.

  As was often the case during my four years as secretary of state, a good night’s sleep would have to wait.

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�� • •

  A FEW MONTHS later, on April 22, 2016—Earth Day—I was at the UN in New York to formally sign the Paris Agreement on behalf of President Obama and the United States. It was a deeply emotional day—made more so by the fact that my daughter Alex, who lived in New York at the time, was there to share it with me, along with my two-year-old granddaughter, Isabelle.

  Before I arrived at the UN, I stopped for a moment to reflect on the history that brought us to that day. I thought about the first Earth Day in 1970, when I joined with millions of Americans in teach-ins to educate the public about the environmental challenges we faced. I thought about the inaugural UN climate conference in Rio, where I first talked at length with my future wife, Teresa. I thought of the urgency we all felt back then in 1992. And of course, I thought about the many ups and downs in the climate fight that led us to that December night at Le Bourget, when it seemed—for the first time—that the world had finally found the path forward.

  But as I sat and played with my granddaughter in the green room behind the lectern, waiting for my turn to go out and sign the agreement, I wasn’t thinking of the past. I thought about the future. Her future. The world her children would one day inherit.

  I was holding Isabelle in my arms, joking with her, when I was told the United States of America had been called to sign the document. Before her mom knew it, Isabelle and I ventured out onstage. A wave of applause surprised me as people reacted to Isabelle’s presence. They were responding just as I had a few moments earlier. This was about her and the nearly two billion children around the world under the age of fifteen. Isabelle never flinched. She didn’t cringe at the sudden exposure to a full General Assembly Hall. She seemed fascinated by it all. With Isabelle sitting on my left knee, I signed the document, stood up and walked over to the edge of the stage, where her mother was observing. When I put Isabelle back in her mother’s open arms, Isabelle announced firmly, “Mummy, I no sign paper,” somehow thinking she got cheated out of her role. Little did she or any of us know the impact she had without her signature.

  Since then, people from all walks of life, all over the world, have told me how that moment moved them too. They were reminded of their own children and grandchildren, they explained. They too thought of the future.

  • • •

  MY LOVE AFFAIR with the ocean began when I was three years old. I’ve seen a number of photos of myself at that age, playing in the light waves near the shore of Naushon with a small plastic shovel and bucket. I was mesmerized by the live snails, the razor clams and the occasional schools of shrimp washing in and out with the rhythm of the water. My mother had to drag me in for dinner. As I got older, I lived in a bathing suit. I loved the smell of the sea air, the screeching squawk of seagulls swooping in to scavenge dead fish or exposed clams at low tide. There was a perceptible pattern to life by the sea. At a remarkably young age I formed a bond with the ocean that eventually led me to the Navy and life always near the water.

  While I was introduced early to the beautiful complexity of the world under the sea—three-quarters of the planet is covered by oceans—it wasn’t until my work on climate change that I began to fully understand the complex synergy that makes up this yet to be fully understood relationship between man and ocean.

  What I do know is that the oceans are responsible for life as we know it: 51 percent of the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean. The currents of the ocean are critical to temperature and weather. The greenhouse effect itself is the temperature regulator of Earth, which until recently helped keep Earth’s temperature at a livable average of 57 degrees Fahrenheit.

  Now all of that is changing. The water is warming. The ice is melting. Spawning grounds for fisheries are being overrun by rising sea levels. Acidity from increased greenhouse gas emissions is bleaching coral, killing reefs and changing the basic ecosystem. Almost every major fishery is at peak fishing or fished out because there is too much money chasing too few fish.

  It’s not just climate change that needs urgent attention. The oceans are at risk. I know that seems implausible because they are so vast and powerful. But the reality is humans are dumping so much garbage, plastic, chemicals, raw sewage and runoff from agriculture and development that the oceans are in increasing numbers of places just overwhelmed. There are over five hundred dead zones in the oceans today—and increasing. The danger is that we don’t fully understand the impact of all that we are doing, but since it is a living ecosystem, the last thing we should be willing to tolerate would be passing a tipping point. We are strip-mining the oceans. We are exploiting the fish stocks that have sustained life for generations. On the high seas, there is no enforcement.

  Just as with climate change, the threats facing our ocean can only be addressed with widespread global cooperation. I was determined to try to advance that cooperation as secretary. We traveled a huge distance to elevate awareness of the oceans—to make them a matter of international governmental focus—not just the domain of nongovernmental voices struggling to be heard.

  Shortly after I arrived at Foggy Bottom, I asked the team to begin planning a global summit that would help to bring the world together to drive that kind of cooperation. I envisioned a high-level conference, with every participant bringing a concrete commitment to the table—whether it be a plan to detect and prosecute illegal fishing, a new policy to help reduce plastic pollution or expanded research programs to help us better understand the chemical changes the ocean is experiencing because of climate change.

  This wasn’t a directive the State Department’s career employees had been anticipating, and at first there was some confusion about what, exactly, I was thinking. They tried hard to accommodate my unusual request. We worked together to develop a conference that would be different—not just to beat the drum for those who were already focused on ocean protection, but to elevate the health of our oceans to the highest levels of government. Much as we were doing with climate change, we wanted to sound the alarm on the dire state of the ocean and drive real action—the kind of action that could only come with high-level attention in capital cities from pole to pole and around the equator.

  The team at the State Department embraced the mission. Getting my foreign counterparts to pay attention was another challenge. Some—like Norwegian foreign minister Børge Brende—were eager to join from the start. He was already a leader. But it wasn’t an issue area many foreign ministries were accustomed to handling. It took persuasion and recruitment.

  We hosted the first Our Ocean conference at the State Department in 2014, and it was more successful than I had anticipated, with governments committing to formally protect more than four million square kilometers of ocean water, among other things. Chile volunteered on the spot to host the second Our Ocean conference in Valparaíso in 2015, and I held the third conference back at the State Department in 2016, which President Obama keynoted and which more than two dozen foreign ministers or heads of state attended. By the time we left, the Our Ocean conferences generated more than $9 billion in pledges to protect the ocean from everything from plastic pollution to illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing. Nations also set aside an additional ten million square kilometers as formal Marine protected areas—collectively, a swath of ocean water roughly the size of the United States. We attacked illegal fishing and created a digital tracking system to ensure accountability on the high seas.

  The most auspicious thing to come out of those conferences, however, was the momentum they generated: in 2017, the EU hosted the fourth annual Our Ocean conference, and Indonesia, Norway and Palau have each committed to hosting future iterations of the conference, ensuring that year after year global leaders will come forward to take stock of the progress made to date and put forth new commitments. The health of our oceans is getting international attention; it is up to everyone now to sustain it.

  • • •

  DURING HIS FINAL year in office, President Obama made it clear to the cabinet he expected us to “run through the
tape.” That certainly included our efforts on climate change. For the next several months, we worked hard to corral China and as many of our international partners as possible to quickly bring the Paris Agreement permanently into force. We accomplished our goal less than a year after it was gaveled in—far faster than even the most optimistic among us might have predicted.

  The Paris Agreement will last beyond what any one U.S. president chooses to do because it addresses a growing threat understood and acknowledged by responsible leaders around the world and, most important, gives each nation the opportunity to design its own approach. Precisely for that reason, many argue it doesn’t go far enough because we are currently on track to hit four degrees centigrade in this century. But it does give us a foundation of nationally determined climate goals on which we can build. It provides support to countries that need help meeting the targets. It leaves no country to weather the storm of climate change alone. It marshals an array of tools in order to help developing nations invest in infrastructure and technology and the science to get the job done. It supports the most vulnerable countries so they can better adapt to the climate impacts that many of those countries are already confronting. And it enables us to ratchet up ambition over time as technology develops and as the price of clean energy comes down. The agreement calls on the parties to revisit their national pledges every five years in order to ensure that we keep pace with the technology and that we accelerate the global transition to a clean energy economy. This process—a cornerstone of the Paris Agreement—gives us a framework that is built to last and a degree of global accountability that has never before existed.