Act on climate change

Kerry: Onus can no longer be on White House to act on climate change

By CAITLIN OPRYSKO

Former Secretary of State John Kerry on Thursday issued an urgent call for Congress to mobilize in response to what he said is the Trump administration’s inaction on climate change, arguing that debating and denying the impetus for increasing global temperatures is making an already steep path to slowing their onslaught even more difficult.

In an op-ed published in the New York Times, Kerry wrote that the impacts of climate change are already ravishing the U.S., pointing to increasingly damaging wildfires and hurricanes that have wreaked havoc over the last few decades and devastating droughts and flooding that are affecting the agricultural world. All of it, he wrote, is evidence that the stakes are too high to spend time debating whether climate change exists.

"Every day we lose ground debating alternative facts," he said, referencing an infamous phrase invented by counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway. “It’s not a ‘he said/she said’ — there’s truth, and then there’s Mr. Trump."

President Donald Trump has long questioned the science pointing to man-made causes for climate change, suggesting that human activity is not to blame for rising global temperatures even though such a conclusion is widely accepted by the scientific community. Although Trump has pledged to protect clean air and water, his administration has taken steps to loosen environmental regulations, a step the president has argued will boost the U.S. economy.

Kerry criticized the Trump administration for remaining on the sidelines in this year’s COP24 climate talks in Poland, where world leaders are stumbling in their attempts to set guidelines for implementing the Paris climate agreement.

Even there, Kerry wrote, leaders “acknowledge that we aren’t close to getting the job done in reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that warm the planet” and the effects of climate change will only worsen unless the U.S. takes action.

Though Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris accord last year is not science-based and is “profoundly dangerous for the entire planet,” reversing course on climate change will be a test for the leaders of the world that requires moving past debates over the science behind climate change and demanding action, Kerry argued.

And “instead of tacitly accepting that inaction is preordained for the remaining two years of the Trump presidency, Congress should send Mr. Trump legislation addressing this crisis,” he said, applauding Democratic congressional leaders for their pushes on the issue in the past.