US climate envoy John Kerry will leave his post to work on President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign.
The former secretary of state and senator has spent the past three years liaising with other countries to push for climate change commitments, now he intends to help Joe Biden’s re-election campaign by popularising the president’s work on global warming.
Kerry has been effective in working with China despite difficult diplomatic relations. Together, the countries are the world’s two biggest polluters, as they account for 41 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions.
The United States and China helped lead December’s COP28 climate summit in Dubai, where negotiators reached an agreement to begin a transition away from oil, gas and coal.
Within a month, Kerry welcomed his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua to California, where the two countries agreed on a climate action plan that partly served as the basis for the nearly 200-nation agreement in Dubai.
One of Biden’s first decisions as president was to return to the Paris climate agreement. Under the 2015 agreement, countries pledged to limit warming on Earth to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius and preferably to a safer threshold of 1.5 degrees.
According to EU climate monitors, 2023 was the hottest year on record, with the rise in the Earth’s surface temperature nearly passing the critical 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold.
