by Glen Johnson
For anyone believing the Defense Department or think tanks were doing the bidding of liberals during a Democratic administration, similar alarms were sounded by the national security establishment during the final year of the Republican administration led by President George W. Bush.
Secretary Kerry saw and heard about all these threats in November 2015 when he visited Naval Station Norfolk on Virginia’s coast.
The installation is the largest naval station in the world—home to seventy-five ships utilizing fourteen piers. The adjacent Chambers Field hosts about 130 aircraft in eleven hangars.445
The scale was evident when the secretary walked up the gangplank and climbed to the bridge of the USS San Antonio for a briefing.
He was told that all he could see from atop the stealthy Marine landing vessel—a view of some $5 billion in taxpayer investment—was at risk because of rising sea levels. That included the piers where six aircraft carriers tie up, as well as the roads and railways transporting all the supplies and people needed to operate them.
When the secretary asked the ship’s captain, J. Pat Rios, about the life expectancy of the base, he replied, “Twenty to fifty years.”446
A Rolling Stone reporter who was with us later wrote, “There was a slight but perceptible pause among the naval officers and State Department officials on the bridge.”447
Kerry outlined his concerns later during a speech nearby at Old Dominion University:
The bottom line is that the impacts of climate change can exacerbate resource competition, threaten livelihoods, and increase the risk of instability and conflict, especially in places already undergoing economic, political, and social stress. And because the world is so extraordinarily interconnected today—economically, technologically, militarily, in every way imaginable—instability anywhere can be a threat to stability everywhere.
He said USAID was working to develop flags highlighting areas of risk. The Pentagon was also developing strategies to shore up Norfolk and similar bases. But a month out from the COP 21 meeting in Paris, John Kerry continued to argue that nations around the world had to agree to cut greenhouse gas emissions and shift to renewable sources of energy.
He harped on the economic opportunities that would accompany the health benefits:
I’m not going to tell you that a global climate agreement is going to be the silver bullet that eliminates the threat posed by climate change. But the truth is, we won’t eliminate it without an agreement in Paris. And the kind of agreement that we’re working toward is one that will prove that the world’s leaders finally understand the scope of the challenge that we are up against.448
_________
I’D NEVER SET FOOT in Paris before we went there in February 2013 during our first trip abroad. By the time we paid our last visit in January 2017, it was a familiar place.
I had a favorite bistro—Bar Romain on Rue de Caumartin—and a favorite running route—up the Champs-Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe, over to the Trocadéro plaza, down to the Seine River and Eiffel Tower, through the 7th Arrondissement, and across the Place de la Concorde. I also had a favorite memory—a visit from my wife to coincide with our trip to Normandy, France, for a ceremony marking the seventieth anniversary of D-Day. That was her birthday.
In fact, Paris was the city we visited most during Secretary Kerry’s four years leading the State Department.
We went there thirty-six times, primarily because it was a diplomatic crossroads and natural venue for diplomats from Eastern and Western Europe. It also offered a welcome climatic and scenic change for their counterparts from the Middle East and Africa.
We returned for a Bastille Day and the World War II commemorations, and twice in 2015 to represent the United States after the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan terrorist attacks.
But we also couldn’t deny a couple of overseas meetings were held in Paris simply because the secretary loved the city and seized the opportunity to visit if he could justify it.
Of course, he had another of those Forrest Gump connections to the French capital.
In July 1940, his mother, Rosemary Forbes, fled a family home on the Brittany coast just before an invasion of German forces. She went to Paris, where things were equally grim ahead of the Nazi onslaught.
She described the scene in the Place de la Concorde in a letter to her future husband, Richard Kerry, which was included in a biography of John Kerry written by The Boston Globe during his 2004 presidential campaign.
The Place de la Concorde, the city’s central square, was filled with cars “laden with every kind of house belongings, in hay carts drawn by weary, perspiring horses, on foot with perambulators, handcarts, wheelbarrows, tricycles carrying invalids and babies dragging dogs, cats, or birdcages. It was a terribly grim and unforgettable sight,” she wrote on July 14, 1940.449
A nurse by training, Rosemary Forbes wanted to stay and help the Red Cross, but she had fled Paris a month earlier as the Germans marched in and set off explosions to announce their arrival.
She eventually boarded a boat to the United States after ducking to avoid strafing runs by German fighters while making her way to Portugal.
I heard Secretary Kerry choke up several times recounting the story of her bravery.
Our visit to Paris in December 2015 was part of a marathon month of travel around the world.
But when we returned on December 7, 2015, after an overnight flight from Washington, the secretary said he wasn’t going to leave before the COP 21 approved a transparent, verifiable agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions. He didn’t let up for five straight days that included his seventy-second birthday.
The Conference of Parties was held at LeBourget Airport in pavilions used annually for the Paris Air Show. Organizers did their best to walk their talk, serving water not in disposable bottles but glass carafes, putting recycling bins everywhere you looked, holding meetings in rooms built of unfinished particle board, and having speakers stand at a plain wooden podium.
Striding through the conference center late on December 8, 2015, the secretary delivered a now-familiar refrain for those of us who had been with him during the Middle East peace process or Iran nuclear talks: “Long day. I spent longer here that I expected. But we’re getting things done. That’s what we came here to do.”450
While negotiators haggled over each country’s respective emissions pledge or other overall tolerable limit for increasing the Earth’s temperature, Kerry focused on the bigger picture.
He felt that if countries from around the world reached consensus in Paris, it would not only chart a path to improve the environment but send a signal to business leaders globally that governments are finally serious about climate change.
That in turn should prompt them to invest in solutions addressing it.
“I don’t believe that governments are going to wind up making the fundamental decision that in fact changes the world to this low-carbon economy. We’re going to set our stage, we can create frameworks, we can lower costs, we can make decisions; but in the end, it’s you,” he said during the Caring for Climate Business Forum on December 8, 2015, in what amounted to his keynote address. “It’s businesses and the choices that you make and the kinds of buildings that you build, the investments that you make, the products you create, the sustainability of your products from start to finish that will make the difference.”451
Four days later, representatives from 195 nations attending the convention reached agreement. They committed to submitting plans of varying scope and ambition that, nonetheless, represented their vow to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
While scientists said these commitments were unlikely to prevent the Earth’s temperature from rising beyond the targeted 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, “the Paris deal could represent the moment at which, because of a shift in global economic policy, the inexorable rise in planet-warming carbon emissions that started during the Industrial Revolution began to level out and eventually decline,” The Ne
w York Times reported.452
Bolstering the agreement was a legally binding requirement for each nation to reconvene every five years, starting in 2020, to offer updated plans with tightened emissions targets. While those targets wouldn’t be mandated, the requirement for updated plans was viewed as a catalyst for curbing the overall climate change trajectory.
In return, developing countries celebrated a commitment from wealthier countries to provide at least $100 billion a year to help poorer countries respond to climate change.
The Times story highlighted the dynamic set in motion by Secretary Kerry during his first trip to Asia:
Negotiators from many countries have said that a crucial moment in the path to the Paris accord came last year in the United States, when [President] Obama enacted the nation’s first climate change policy—a set of stringent new Environmental Protection Agency regulations designed to slash greenhouse gas pollution from the nation’s coal-fired power plants. Meanwhile, in China, the growing internal criticism over air pollution from coal-fired power plants led President Xi Jinping to pursue domestic policies to cut coal use.453
The sentiment was echoed in a story in Huffington Post written by GlobalPost’s Charlie Sennott. He formerly worked for The Boston Globe and wrote a lengthy profile of then senator Kerry during his 1996 reelection campaign against William Weld. In the Huffington Post article, Sennott wrote:
Kerry’s hair has gone from a candidate’s salt-and-pepper to a statesman’s silver gray. . . . It struck me as I watched Kerry speaking that in a month swirling with breaking news on terrorism and climate change, there are few public officials in the world who have as measured a grasp of how climate change fits within the matrix of threats the world is presenting these days. Increasingly, we are waking up to a globe where climate change in a resource-constrained world is fueling civil instability that stands to shape conflict in the 21st century.454
_________
JUST BEFORE SECRETARY KERRY flew to Antarctica in November 2016, Russia made another reversal in its willingness to cooperate with the Obama administration.
After five prior votes against it, the Russian Federation agreed to join the United States, twenty-two other nations, and the European Union in transforming the Ross Sea in Antarctica’s Southern Ocean into the world’s largest MPA, or marine protected area.
The Ross Sea is considered pristine, and the krill flourishing in its chilly water feed killer whales and Adélie and Emperor penguins.
Britain’s Guardian newspaper underscored the importance of the agreement: “The Ross Sea is a deep bay in the Southern Ocean that many scientists consider to be the last intact marine ecosystem on Earth—a living laboratory ideally suited for investigating life in the Antarctic and how climate change is affecting the planet.”455
Secretary Kerry gave a nod to the Russians in a statement that said, “The creation of the Ross Sea MPA is an extraordinary step forward for marine protection, and the United States is grateful for the cooperation with our New Zealand co-sponsors of the proposal, and of all [Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources] members, including Russia, to make this achievement possible.”456
Our visit to Antarctica was a logistical feat given the remoteness of the continent and its unique governance.
The mass encircling the bottom of the Earth exists under a 1959 treaty in which twelve original signatories—including the United States—agreed that Antarctica would be reserved for peaceful purposes. The signatories also committed to protecting the environment and conducting scientific research.
Seven countries—Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Argentina, the United Kingdom, France, and Norway—claim slices of the continental “pie” making up Antarctica. Some of their pieces in fact overlap. The United States and the Russian Federation never made any similar claim, but they also don’t recognize the claims of any other country.
Nonetheless, the United States works closely with New Zealand, and McMurdo Station is located near the Kiwis’ Scott Base in the area claimed by their country.
All told, there are about eighty stations on the continent, thirty of them year-round.
The United States program, the largest in Antarctica, is run by the National Science Foundation under a presidential directive. Day-to-day responsibility is held by the United States Antarctic Program, which runs three year-round stations.
Palmer Station is on the Antarctic Peninsula, which extends about eight hundred miles due north toward Argentina. About fifty people live there, and it is primarily used for bird research.
McMurdo Station, located across the continent closer to New Zealand, is the US logistical hub and a research center. About 1,200 people live there in the summer, but only about 250 people are “winter-overs” who stay there through the blackness of winter, when there are no cargo flights or ship traffic in or out.
The third site is the Amundsen Scott South Pole Station, where the summer population of about two hundred dwindles to about fifty people during the winter. It’s been continuously occupied since 1956.
The newly renovated station sits at 9,000 feet in elevation, several hundred yards from the geographical South Pole. That spot is denoted with a geographic marker reset each year as the ice underneath it shifts. There’s also a ceremonial barber pole nearby for picture taking.
The stations are reached by a logistical bridge extending more than ten thousand miles. The so-called Peninsula System leapfrogs from the United States to Santiago and Punta Arenas, Chile, before ending at Palmer Station. The Continental System runs through New Zealand and connects to McMurdo Station, the interim stop for any visitor to Amundsen Scott Station at the South Pole.457
The only period for outsiders to visit Antarctica is during the local summer, coming during the winter months in the northern hemisphere. The US Air Force provides the most frequent flights between New Zealand and McMurdo Station, and a New York Air National Guard Airlift Wing runs Operation Deep Freeze to the South Pole, flying that last leg between McMurdo and Amundsen stations.
Each takeoff and landing at those bases is dependent on the weather, and visitors frequently get trapped at one end or the other due to quickly changing conditions. Other times, planes are forced to turn back when weather deteriorates en route, sometimes even after they’ve flown up to five hours to reach their destination.
Amid concerns about stranding the secretary of State for an inordinate amount of time, planners paid special attention to ensuring John Kerry would be able to get in and out on the days he visited.
_________
OUR TRIP STARTED ON November 7, 2016, with a nonstop flight from Washington to Hawaii. We boarded the same plane for our Election Day flight from Hawaii to New Zealand.
After we arrived, we held a bilateral meeting with Foreign Minister Murray McCully and then waited out the weather on November 9, 2016. The secretary took a walk through Hagley Park before grabbing lunch at a tapas place called the Curators House.
Christchurch, the largest city on New Zealand’s South Island, has an English feel, but was still rebuilding at that time after damage caused by two earthquakes in 2010 and 2011.
We also visited a US Antarctic Program depot so we could be fitted for our “ECW”: extreme cold weather gear that included polar jackets, pants, boots, and thick leather gloves.
Very early on November 10, 2016, we got the all clear to fly from New Zealand to Antarctica. Secretary Kerry carried an orange duffel bag filled with his loaner gear as he climbed into a C-17 cargo plane for the flight to McMurdo Station.
The four-engine transport—the same kind Kerry flew on after breaking his leg—is the most modern in the Air Force fleet. It was operated by a crew from McChord Air Force Base near Seattle. They fly the plane south for about six weeks, make several continuous round trips a week between New Zealand and Antarctica, and then take their plane back home while another McChord crew flies in a fresh C-17.
The cost and infrequency of the flights between Christch
urch and McMurdo Station make each one prized, so our group wasn’t alone on the plane. There were several scientists also traveling, and the rest of the cargo hold was filled with supplies—including a big four-bladed replacement propeller for one of the C-130s flying between McMurdo and the South Pole.
Riding in a cargo plane is disorienting compared to a normal commercial airliner. You may sit sideways on the mesh seats running the length of the fuselage, or in the middle of the cargo hold in a section of airline seating that slides on or off via tracks in the floor. The only windows are coaster-sized holes on the doors and a pair of portals overlooking each wing that let crew members look at the engines and perform safety checks.
Since there’s no other outside view, you have to rely on your hearing and sense of balance to tell you if you’re climbing, descending, or turning left or right. Landing is heart-stopping because you hear the engines winding down and can feel the airplane flare into the proper approach position, but you hang in suspense until the unseen moment when the wheels slam into the ground.
The one big exception is in the cockpit, where wraparound windows offer a full view out, up, and down. Secretary Kerry took the extra seat up on the flight deck so he could see outside as we flew to a place not seen by many people.
The beginning of our five-hour flight south was boring, the plane passing over water extending in every direction. But about an hour before landing, we began to see Antarctica, invigorating those lucky enough to find a place to peek outside.
The biggest landmark amid the endless snow and ice was Mount Erebus, the second-highest volcano on the continent and the southernmost active volcano on Earth. It rises about 12,500 feet above Ross Island, the ice-covered landmass that’s also home to McMurdo Station.458