(Bloomberg) — Special Presidential Envoy for Climate Change John Kerry said that investment will keep on pouring into US green technology despite Republican gains in the midterm elections.
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The former senator and Democratic presidential candidate said that governments weren’t able to able to finance the energy transition, and the private sector would be the source of the trillions of dollars the world needed to build a clean energy system.
In a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait on Wednesday, Kerry also brushed off suggestions that informal talks with his Chinese counterpart at the COP27 climate talks marked a thawing of relations between the two countries.
“We’ve had some informal talks, but we’re not in any formal negotiation at this point,” Kerry said at the Bloomberg Green summit at the COP27 climate talks in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.
Kerry said his friendship with China’s climate envoy Xie Zhenhua has been forged over years of negotiations and meetings in airports as they traveled round the world. Right now, however, that relationship is strained by Beijing’s decision to suspend talks on climate following House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.
“I certainly stand ready to negotiate,” Kerry said. “The climate crisis is not a bilateral issue.”
Kerry also defended his plan to allow businesses to get carbon credits for investments in decarbonization projects in developing countries, insisting creative approaches are necessary to accelerate the green transition, cap the world’s warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius and deploy trillions of dollars in risk-averse capital.
“You’re never going to deploy the trillions of dollars unless you have a bankable deal,” he said, adding that this new initiative aims to de-risk these investments. “We’re trying to make it possible to do that, and if people say, ‘Well, I just don’t like these things’ and ‘You can’t do that’ without thinking through the guardrails and the safety and the way it could work and be measured, then you are condemning us to absolutely pass through 1.5 degrees.”
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