For a clean economy, the real fight is to deploy enough capital, John Kerry says

John Kerry has left the role of the US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate but is not abandoning the issue altogether, rather he intends to focus on what he considers to be the main challenge, he said at an event this week.

Kerry was given the job of the top US climate official immediately after President Joe Biden took office.

“Now, though, I’ve left, I am not leaving the issue. I intend to put my efforts where I think the real fight is, which is to deploy enough capital, money, to be able to make the deals necessary so that we can transition to the clean economy. Now, that has to happen, or we don’t win this battle,” he stated virtually during a panel at the Green Transition Forum 4.0 in Sofia, Bulgaria, also attended by Maros Sefcovic, the executive vice-president of the European Commission.

While he commended China and India for their efforts in this direction, he underscored that it is still not evident that the entire world is ready to take the necessary steps to be able to win the battle. Nevertheless, he expressed confidence that the world is capable of solving the problem of climate change.

“For the first time in history, more money is now going into clean energy, about USD 2 trillion (EUR 1.87trn), than is going into fossil fuels, which got about USD 1 trillion in the course of last year,” he said.

“If we just deployed more renewables at the levels necessary between now and 2030, we could achieve the 43% reduction that the IPCC [the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] tells us we need,” the politician added.

When asked about whether the required technological solutions are developing fast enough, Kerry stressed that they are indeed moving and gave a few examples.

“Batteries, for instance, will move from lithium-ion to different inputs that are going to make those batteries be able to hold electricity longer so that you can balance your baseloads more effectively going forward. We have hydrogen, which is quite moving as fast as we had hoped, but nevertheless electrolysers are now five times more efficient than they were. The price of solar has come down 83%, the price of wind is down 50%, lithium batteries are down 97%. So, the more we push the technology, and the more demand there is to implement it, the more money is going to be able to go and effect this transition.

He went on to say that he is a big believer in nuclear energy as one of the available tools to combat climate change. “We now have to develop small modular reactors as fast as we can. Why? Because those small reactors are capable of providing very high levels of heat and power to heavy industry [...],” Kerry said.

Also part of the panel was Dimitar Enchev, co-founder and CEO of CWP Global, which is a major renewable energy developer in Central and Eastern Europe. He agreed, to some extent, with the former US Secretary of State about the role of nuclear energy.

“Nuclear is great and I agree with what Mr. Kerry said, but that’s a solution for the next decade, right? We need to work on it, but we also need to remember that we’re burning coal for about 16% of our electricity in Europe. That’s more expensive and it’s hugely polluting and it has a massive carbon footprint. So, I think, we need to attack the low-hanging fruit as quickly as possible,” he stressed, referring to renewable energies.

Enchev also said that people need to stop seeing the energy transition as a challenge because it actually is an opportunity, a sentiment with which Kerry strongly agreed. The US diplomat further noted that “this is the largest economic transformation the world will ever engage in,” bigger than the Industrial Revolution. As proof, he mentioned that a couple of years ago the fastest-growing job in America was wind turbine technician, while the third one was solar panel installer.

In conclusion, Kerry stated that the world could either make use of and deploy technologies or just sit back and allow business as usual to continue. “That is basic politics and basic common sense and we need to push more than ever before for common sense to govern the choices that we face.”

(USD 1.0 = EUR 0.935)

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