Every Day Is Extra

by John Kerry

  The environmental progress we made in 2016 alone extends well beyond Paris. For example, international aviation wasn’t covered by what we did in Paris. If that sector were a country, it would rank among the top dozen greenhouse gas emitters in the world. So in early October 2016, with U.S. support, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) established a sector-wide agreement for carbon-neutral growth.

  A few weeks later, I traveled to Kigali, Rwanda, to work with representatives from nearly two hundred countries to phase down the global production and use of hydrofluorocarbons, greenhouse gases that are less common but thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide. In part because much of the world was paying little attention to the negotiations, they were tougher than we had anticipated. I remember one particularly prickly meeting with the Indian delegation. The rest of the parties had essentially agreed on the text, but the Indians were pushing hard for what we viewed as a totally unreasonable change. Finally, I told their minister, “President Obama is going to call Prime Minister Modi later today. He can either call to explain how the Indian delegation single-handedly prevented the nearly two hundred parties from reaching an agreement, or he can call to thank him for his cooperation in addressing a matter of such global concern.” In the end, we resolved the dispute, but tensions had been so high that when we realized we finally had a deal, both of our delegations spontaneously broke into applause in the small room in which we had been cloistered. In the end, we succeeded—and the so-called Kigali Amendment could single-handedly help us avoid an entire half-degree centigrade of warming by the end of the century, while at the same time opening up new opportunities for growth in a range of industries.

  Our last year in office, 2016, was a banner year for climate diplomacy. With Paris, Kigali and ICAO, we hit an environmental trifecta. It was the single most effective year for the environment I can remember since groundbreaking legislation was passed in the early 70s. President Obama’s focus paid off. Every one of these steps combined to move the climate discussion in the right direction. Global leaders finally seemed to wake up to the enormity of the climate challenge. There was hope the international community might actually do what is necessary to meet this generational test.

  • • •

  I SPENT ELECTION Day 2016 on our military plane, headed to New Zealand with my team. Our communications were shoddy as we flew over the Pacific, but from time to time my friends in Boston or Washington would email me the latest exit polls. Every so often I’d wander out into the main cabin and share the news with my senior staff. “I know a thing or two about exit polls,” I reminded them. “Let’s see how it goes.”

  By the time we landed in Christchurch, it was clear that Donald J. Trump was going to be our next president. As a few members of my team and I watched his victory speech in my hotel suite, I tried to process what a Trump victory would mean for so much of the progress we had made during the Obama administration. More than anything else, I was worried about what President Trump would do—or not do—to fight climate change. The prospect of a climate change denier in the White House was the last thing the planet needed.

  A few days after the 2016 election, I was headed to Marrakesh, Morocco, for the first COP since Paris. My speechwriter and I had been working on a “tough love” speech—a “don’t think the hard work is behind you” speech—underscoring the need for countries to hold one another accountable to the goals we had set the previous year. Obviously, that would no longer work. The United States had just elected as president a man who described climate change as a “hoax perpetrated by the Chinese.” The world’s climate experts and negotiators needed to hear why they should have any faith at all that the agreement would endure.

  So we rewrote the speech. And when I got to Marrakesh, I reminded the climate community of how far we had come together and how impossible it would be for any one leader to reverse the transition toward clean energy—a transition that, thanks in large part to Paris, was already under way. I expressed my hope that perhaps a President Trump would be more responsible than a candidate Trump had been. And I stressed to them why our shared efforts were so important: nothing less than the future world our children and grandchildren will inherit is at stake. “It’s important to remind ourselves that we are not on a preordained path to disaster,” I told the packed room. “It’s not written in the stars. This is about choices—choices that we still have. This is a test of willpower, not capacity. It’s within our power to put the planet back on a better track. But doing that requires holding ourselves accountable to the hard truth. It requires holding ourselves accountable to facts, not opinion; to science, not theories that can’t be proven—and certainly not to political bromides.”

  I was on the ground in Morocco for less than twenty-four hours, but while I was there, I asked Jonathan Pershing (no relation to Dick), who had by then replaced Todd as our special envoy for climate change, if he could gather the whole U.S. negotiating team together. I wanted to talk to them.

  When I walked into the room Pershing had reserved, I looked around at the amazing group of public servants who had dedicated so much of their careers to solving this challenge. The excited smiles I had seen on their faces in Paris had been replaced by solemn expressions. They didn’t know what to expect.

  I was candid with them. I said that I didn’t know what to expect either. But I told them that even if Trump followed through on his campaign pledge to abandon the Paris Agreement—even if he walked away from renewable energy and started subsidizing coal and other fossil fuels—even if he took every step imaginable to reverse the progress we had made, as was his prerogative—even then, so much of what we had achieved would continue. In 2017, 75 percent of the new electricity coming online in the United States came from solar. Coal contributed 0.2 percent. Even a President Trump cannot undo what the marketplace is doing.

  The energy market was moving in the right direction. The international community was committed. Prime ministers and presidents everywhere understood the challenge like never before—and so, by the way, did American mayors and governors and business leaders. The world would take on the climate threat, with or without the support of the president of the United States.

  • • •

  TODAY I FEEL myself growing increasingly angry as ideology and cheap, lowest-common-denominator politics destroy what is left of America’s leadership on this issue. I feel as if someone else’s ignorance and demagoguery is stealing the future from my children and grandchildren, from the planet itself.

  My mind keeps flashing back to my trip to Antarctica. To really see and understand the full magnitude of the climate threat, you have to go there. I was the first secretary of state and the highest-ranking U.S. official to ever make the trip. I flew by helicopter over the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. I walked out onto the Ross Sea ice shelf. I flew to McMurdo Station in Antarctica to see and understand even better what is taking place.

  Antarctica contains multiple ice sheets that are, in some places, three miles deep or more. If we are irresponsible about climate change and all that ice melts, then sea levels would rise somewhere between one hundred and two hundred feet in the next couple of centuries. For the past fifty years, climate scientists have believed just the West Antarctic Ice Sheet alone is a sword of Damocles, hanging over our entire way of life. Large chunks, including one the size of Rhode Island, have already broken off and drifted out to sea. Should the entire ice sheet break apart and melt into the sea, it alone could raise global sea levels by four to five meters.

  Standing there, the power of God’s creation was unmistakable. Each of the three great Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Islam and Christianity) calls on believers to protect creation. Every values-based approach to life, every philosophy, talks of our responsibility to each other and to creation. The first inhabitants of North America, Native Americans, maintained a beautiful balance with elements around them.

  But if religion isn’t enough to stir your conscience, science certainly must
. In Antarctica, I listened to the scientists who are on the front lines, not politicians or pundits, but people whose entire lives are dedicated to extensive research and who draw conclusions based on facts, not ideology. They were all clear: the more they learn, the more alarmed they become about the speed with which these changes are happening.

  A scientist from New Zealand named Gavin Dunbar described what they’re seeing as the “canary in the coal mine” and warned that some thresholds, if we cross them, cannot be reversed. The damage we inflict could take centuries to undo, he said, if it can be undone at all.

  The scientists in Antarctica told me that they are still trying to figure out how quickly this change is happening. But they know for certain that it is happening, and it’s happening faster than they previously thought possible. An American glacial geologist, a fellow whose name is appropriately enough John Stone, didn’t mince words when he told me, “The catastrophic period could already be under way.”

  For anyone who cares about the world and our future, those words should be more than sobering; for a diplomat or a leader, no matter who is in the White House, science and fact must be motivating—while there’s still time to act.

  Afterword

  JULY 4, 2018. As I wrote this book, I tried hard to fight the numbing power of nostalgia. A memoir is a tempting venue to look back and see the good outcomes in life as preordained. It’s always easy to believe things were better “back when.” My parents instilled in me great respect for history. I was encouraged to live it—and perhaps even to help make some of it. But history—real history, not the phony demagoguery about the mythical past calculated and propagated to mobilize unthinking retro movements— inspires because it reminds us that times weren’t always easy. The winter soldiers of Valley Forge inspire not because they knew they’d win; their determination is more awesome because they had every reason to believe they might end up at the end of a British rope, and yet they persevered.

  It’s easy to put on rose-tinted glasses, look back at earlier days and say “those were better times” or easier times, when the truth is, they weren’t. I tried to avoid those traps in writing my story.

  I share this because I was tempted to write that I was born into a gentler or simpler era at home and abroad. But, on reflection, I wasn’t. The Leave It to Beaver America of the 1950s had much to admire. For most, jobs came with pensions and economic security. We were an optimistic country. But we were also a country where Jim Crow was still the law and “Whites Only” signs dotted the landscape in half our country, and were unspoken but just as real in the other half. Women were devalued and LGBT Americans had to be invisible to avoid persecution.

  It took years, until I was in college, for Congress to pass bedrock civil rights legislation.

  Joe McCarthy trampled on civil liberties and invoked a fact-free Red Scare at home, which divided and distracted us in dangerous ways. Overseas, we were basking in the afterglow of victory in World War II and through the Marshall Plan we were rebuilding the economies of our former enemies. But World War II had been succeeded by a perilous Cold War. We soon awakened from the euphoria of 1945 to find America’s sons dying in Korea in a proxy conflict with the Soviet Union. A decade later, I watched on a grainy black-and-white television set as President Kennedy led us through the Cuban Missile Crisis and the very real danger of nuclear holocaust. Our tragic misinterpretation of Cold War reality led us into a quagmire in Southeast Asia for which nearly sixty thousand Americans paid the ultimate price. And Richard Nixon brought us domestic spying on dissenters, abuse of the Department of Justice for political purposes, attacks on the free press, a presidential “enemies list” and the mire of what President Gerald Ford called “our national nightmare.” I learned the hard way at twenty-seven what it was like to be a target of a rogue White House. Pipe bombs were exploding in public places; riots saw blocks of cities set on fire; irreplaceable leaders were assassinated. The list goes on.

  I’ve told much of this story in these pages for a reason: not to relive a difficult past, but to remember how we changed the course of our country. Good people believed the world—at home and abroad—could be different and better. Citizens organized. People fought for something. We marched. We voted. We got knocked down and we got back up.

  No, “the good old days weren’t always good.” That’s not an insult to America, that’s an affirmation of America: an America that makes itself stronger when, despite long odds and searing setbacks, everyday citizens stand up and decide that the way things are isn’t the way things have to be.

  My life has been a story of faith in America tested and redeemed not by being passive, but by being passionate about our country and its promise. It is the story of a journey begun in the latter half of the twentieth century and lived now in the morning of the twenty-first: two different eras of staggering transformation in how we live, learn, work and relate to each other, two different eras where old assumptions were constantly challenged and confounded and when faith in institutions came under intense scrutiny. This is also a story about how we listen and how we learn, how we face problems, how we try to embrace a vision of the future that meets our best hopes and aspirations.

  In the end, I believe it is a story of optimism, but clearly a story that doesn’t unfold on autopilot. It’s not an automatic. It’s optimism earned the hard way.

  In my life, I’ve seen things that were hard to imagine—if not regarded as impossible—happen again and again—and I learned from people who bent history. I wanted to share their stories as well as mine.

  All of this recounting and retelling also reminded me that the world has always been complicated. Truly complicated. Leaders have always been imperfect, some even downright malevolent, others too small for the moment. The fight at home has always been a struggle.

  That is what makes me all the more optimistic about today: because I’ve seen with my own eyes that the institutions the Founders created to hold America together have worked best when America needed them the most. I have the scars to prove it, and I know that while we’ve often faced daunting challenges, in the end, we have met them.

  I’m an optimist because America has a pretty good, 242-year record of turning difficult passages into landmark progress. I’m an optimist because of the people I’ve met and what life has taught me.

  How could I not be? I began my service to country in a war, a bitter war that frayed and nearly shredded the fabric of America. I finished my last tour of service to country in a mission of peace. In the final month of my service as secretary of state, I was back in Vietnam one more time, on the Mekong Delta where the rivers I’d patrolled in combat had become rivers the United States was now protecting from environmental degradation.

  Back on the Bay Hap River, where almost forty-eight years before I’d come face-to-face with my own mortality, staring down the business end of a Viet Cong B-40 rocket launcher, I met a man whose mission that day in 1969 was to kill me and my crew. We were the same age. He was short and sinewy, not an ounce of fat, his face lined with the years and the hardship, but with a smile of welcome, devoid of hatred or malice. I looked at him and thought, How crazy is this? Years ago, when we were young, we were both heeding the call of our leaders, trying to kill each other. But now we stood there in peace, a peace I had been privileged in some small way to help make real by first making peace at home. If that doesn’t make you an optimist, nothing will.

  That’s why I wrote this book: to share with you that the abiding truth I’ve learned in my journey is you can change your country and you can change the world. You may fail at first, but you can’t give in. You have to get up and fight the fight again, but you can get there. The big steps and the small steps all add up. History is cumulative. We all can contribute to change if we’re willing to enter the contest for the future, often against the odds.

  Why this book and why now? Not just because I have finished my time as secretary of state and in the Senate, but because the causes that have defined m
y life until now have never been more at risk. Our democracy is challenged. But I remain confident in our ability to reclaim it because our democracy is as alive as any person who lives in it. It is constantly changing, growing and reinventing itself. But its well-being always—always—depends on citizens to keep it alive. The strength of the United States is derived not from a party, not from a leader, but from a natural resource that is truly renewable: the resolve of our citizens and their commitment to make the American ideal a reality.

  Even after an amazing journey, I’m still learning, and still fighting. If you take nothing else away from the American journey I describe in these pages, I hope it’s this: there’s nothing wrong with America and the world today that can’t be fixed by what’s right with our citizens and with people around the globe. As John Kennedy said when he sought and won the first breakthrough in nuclear arms control, “Our problems are man-made—therefore they can be solved by man.”

  My hope is that as you finish reading these pages, you will believe more in the possibilities and less in the hurdles, and that more of you will dare to try more. I will keep using my extra days to do my part—and I see so many others now fighting on the front lines of our history. Extra days aren’t just a gift for those who served in war; they are a gift for all of us fortunate to be blessed with the freedom to stand up and seek the best America and a better world.