Secretary of State John Kerry called climate change the “most serious challenge we face on the planet” in 2014, but now Kerry seems to have changed his tune.
During a press conference in Denmark Thursday, Kerry said, “Let me just say that one of the greatest challenges of our times besides the fight against extremism is to deal with the enormous battle of climate change,” as reported by The Washington Examiner.
This statement marks an obvious shift from his former stance — his words “besides the fight against extremism” most notably signal a shift from his stance two years ago.
At a 2014 climate conference in New York, Kerry said: “The threat of climate change is, without question, one of the defining if not the defining challenge — I’d probably give violent extremism — have to say one of — the defining threat of a generation,” Kerry also said at a speech in Jakarta in 2014 that climate change is the “world’s largest weapon of mass destruction.”
While there is a shift in his appraisal of the two issues, Kerry still sees climate change as a serious threat. “This thing called climate change is looming out there,” Kerry said in a speech in Norway on Wednesday, “a decidedly different challenge but, let me tell you, one that is existential.”
Kerry was not alone in his former position that climate change was the biggest threat facing humanity. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton echoed that same sentiment while speaking at the 2014 National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas: “climate change is the most consequential, urgent, sweeping collection of challenges we face.”
President Barack Obama agreed during his 2015 State of the Union speech: “No challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change,”
Vice President Joe Biden also joined the chorus in a speech to college students in Iowa in February of 2015, “Global warming is the greatest threat to your generation of anything at all, across the board.”
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