Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday that fighting global warming should not be a politically partisan issue.
President-elect Donald Trump should keep in mind that nearly every military leader and government official believe that specific actions should be taken to reduce carbon emissions, Kerry told an audience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
“The truth is that climate change shouldn’t be a partisan issue,” he said, referring to the wide array of Washington politicos who feel climate change is an important issue. “It’s an issue that all of us should care about, regardless of political affiliation.”
Trump once described climate change as a Chinese hoax created to hurt American business and vowed to yank the U.S. out of the Paris agreement in 2015. He hedged his bets in December, telling reporters that he was keeping an open mind about pulling out of the agreement.
Kerry also tried to handicap Trump’s ability to pull back on President Barack Obama’s climate policies, telling the Massachusetts audience that the real estate tycoon — now president-elect — could find it difficult to implement his own policies.
He said the president-elect’s environmental cabinet members will find it hard to rollback Obama’s positions, because green energy producers “will continue to create the technological advances that forever revolutionize the way we power our world.”
Obama’s EPA head, Gina McCarthy, said something similar earlier this week, telling agency employees that Trump will “come in here with policies he wants to implement and changes he wants to make,” but most of his objectives will be hampered, she added, by gains made throughout the past few years in green energy.
Kerry’s comments blasting the partisan environment comes after the former Massachusetts senator told a forum in 2015 that global warming skeptics “disqualify themselves fundamentally from high public office with those kinds of statements.”He also told the MIT crowd that a Citizen Kerry would “be as involved as I can” in future fights to make sure the Paris agreement, which requires a dramatic decrease in worldwide carbon emissions by 2030, is adhered to.
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