MR. CAPEHART: Hello again. I’m Jonathan Capehart, associate editor of The Washington Post. [Applause] MR. CAPEHART: And with me for our closing plenary session about China is former Secretary of State and former Special Envoy for Climate for President Biden, John Kerry. Secretary Kerry, thank you very much for being here. We are crunched for time. You are especially crunched for time. So I’m just going to dive in. When you were the U.S. Climate Envoy, what was your sense of the Chinese government’s urgency in countering climate change? MR. KERRY: I would say that China was in transition from not moving sufficiently or embracing the challenge to actually embracing it, and as a result of the Sunnylands negotiation that we had in California a couple years ago–I guess a year ago now–China agreed to do things they never agreed to do. One, to list all greenhouse gases in their national goal. Two–and that includes methane, which they hadn’t done. So they also agreed to do a national methane reduction plan, which is critical. And thirdly, they agreed to accelerate in this decade, which they were kind of refusing to do, claiming that this is really the responsibility of the less–of the developed countries. So now as we sit here today, China is the–is producing renewable energy to such a degree and deploying it, that they’re doing more than the whole rest of the world put together, staggering, a staggering amount of power they’re bringing online, and this is to the world’s benefit. So I know a lot of rifles and guns and whatever are, you know, sort of pointed at that direction by politicians who don’t want to look at what’s going on, but what’s going on is we found a way to cooperate, because we talked. We […]
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