ONE BY ONE the sleek BMW police motorcycles escorted motorcade after motorcade to a precisely designated place at the gate to the exhibition hall at Le Bourget Airport, not far from the exact spot where Charles Lindbergh had touched down in the Spirit of St. Louis after his epic transatlantic flight in 1927. Black limousine after black limousine then broke away from the motorcade to roll up to a grand entrance with a huge red carpet, where the leaders of the world, one after the other, stepped out of their cars to be formally greeted by President François Hollande of France. A bank of cameras focused on each arrival as the leaders turned to pose for photographs, a steady, repetitive moment in the sun to satisfy each home audience and history.
President Obama arrived in the oversized, overweight limo called “the beast.” I suppose that arriving at the Conference of the Parties (COP) for the Global Climate Change meeting in Paris, we might have thought twice about rolling up in a gas-guzzling behemoth that allegedly gets 3.7 miles to the gallon, but the Secret Service doesn’t factor climate or messaging into presidential security. The president stepped onto the red carpet while the rest of us went around the official greeting party.
One after the other, the cavalcade continued. President Xi of China. Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India. President Putin of Russia. King Abdullah of Jordan. Presidents, prime ministers, kings and princes—150 strong had all come to Paris because the world appeared to be finally galvanizing around the urgency of addressing climate change. I can’t think of any other meeting or event, other than the UN General Assembly, that commanded such attendance, and unlike the UNGA in New York, this was all happening at the same time, all on the same day, compressed within a few hours. It was an extraordinary assemblage. It was also a moment of solidarity with France. Just a couple of weeks earlier, homegrown Islamic extremists had blown themselves up and unleashed torrents of gunfire inside a Paris concert hall, at the soccer stadium and outside bars and restaurants, murdering 130 innocent people and wounding hundreds more. Worries about security forced cancellation of a long-planned march for the planet. What a startling juxtaposition: Paris paralyzed by those who wanted to destroy civilization itself, while hundreds of leaders were gathering to try to save it from a different existential threat.
Inside the exhibition hall, heads of state posed together for what is known as the “family photo,” all standing dutifully next to one another on a dais, posing for a class picture. They greeted each other like old friends whether they had met before or hated each other. Even Bibi Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas shook hands for the first time in five years. Some issues are so important that even enemies are able to work in common cause.
Then, in another departure from the usual protocol of such a meeting, everyone milled around and slowly shuffled their way through a tent corridor into the plenary chamber, which was a large hard-frame tent set up for the conference. It was a rare moment of egalitarian opportunity to corral one leader or another, whether they wanted to talk or not. I chuckled watching the body language of some leaders as they were importuned unexpectedly and others expansively holding forth, obviously enjoying the conversation. None of us had ever seen such an assemblage of world leaders sauntering through a hallway like high school kids moving from one class to another.
This was the formal opening of the Twenty-First Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The first day would be consumed by heads of state speeches to the plenary. One by one, they described their country’s particular concerns and urged the conference to act before it was too late.
The road to this meeting was not as easy as the vast assemblage seemed to suggest. For many of the attendees, there were still tricky issues to be resolved. Less developed nations wanted more clean energy technology donated to their impoverished countries, particularly since they were barely contributing to the problem. Island nations wanted to be saved from disappearing beneath a rising ocean. Oil-producing countries wanted to protect their economic life source as they transitioned to a new economy. Every region had its own survival instincts. And, of course, the twenty major polluting nations bearing responsibility for 80 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions faced huge pressure from powerful economic interests.
I thought back to a night in the weeks before I was confirmed as secretary. I was enjoying a dinner with my Senate chief of staff, at Las Placitas, a hole-in-the-wall Salvadoran restaurant on Capitol Hill. He would join me as my chief of staff at the State Department. We were talking through the workload and agenda while enjoying terrific guacamole, salsa and margaritas, a pleasant way to plan the future.
Former secretary James Baker had previously shared with me how important it was to set two or three top priorities and never lose sight of them. I pulled out my Senate legal pad and made the short list and the long list. In 2013, there were the obvious, enduring challenges for any American secretary of state: nuclear weapons, war, terrorism, religious extremism. But I wanted to elevate another priority, just as urgent and existential, yet woefully under-resourced at the State Department and astonishingly not accepted in all quarters as a crisis at all. I wanted to do for the environment what my predecessor, Hillary Clinton, had done for global women’s issues. Why was I so focused on the environment? Quite simply, because even as a person of faith, I believe in science, and after a quarter century working on the issue, I knew as a matter of scientific fact that climate change is an existential threat. There is no Planet B.
It is nothing less than extraordinary to me that in the United States, without evidence, without factual, scientific inquiry, charlatans get away with arguing that climate change is not hugely aggravated by man-made choices. It is beyond Orwellian, beyond the old disinformation of the Cold War. It is even more disturbing that the current president of the United States has eagerly assumed the role of cheerleader in chief for capricious choices that will cost lives and treasure.
The profound environmental concern I brought to public life came directly from my mother’s choices and environmentalist Rachel Carson’s inspiration. My mother never shoved the environment at any of us, but her example was powerful and sublime at the same time. At Potomac School, she was a principal mover in the creation of the nature walk where we buried my Cairn terrier, Sandy. She could identify countless birds and even rose early sometimes to go bird-watching. She was one of the original recyclers. She served on the health committee of her local community. She taught us to respect our surroundings, pick up trash, not pollute. She was my early indoctrination in the meaning of an ecosystem.
Of course at Naushon Island we were surrounded by a natural habitat that, from my earliest years, required respect, even reverence. Because the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution was based just across from the island, we would not only visit and be mesmerized by Marine species in tanks and stories of exploration, but we would often bump into researchers gathering specimens off the shores of the island. My mother was a huge Jacques Cousteau fan. Watching the Cousteau specials on TV was regular fare.
When Silent Spring was published in 1962, my freshman year at Yale, Rachel Carson instilled in me and a whole generation a sense of moral urgency. Her story of corporate connivance and government complicity in hiding the killer impacts of pesticides on humans was an eye-opener at the time. We hadn’t yet grown so cynical that we expected either corporations or government to mislead the consumer. It was a rude awakening to what we now have come to expect as just the way it is. The cigarette companies hid the evidence that smoking gives you cancer; the Woburn dump hid the leaching that could give people cancer; the coal companies denied any responsibility for acid rain—the examples are plentiful. Because of Rachel Carson sounding the alarm, I was privileged to be involved in the takeoff of the modern environmental movement.
Now, in 2013, forty-three years after the first Earth Day, as well as my many efforts on oceans, fisheries, acid rain and climate legislation in the Senate, I was excited that as secretary of state I could represent a president and administration deeply committed to reaching a global agreement on climate change at the 2015 COP in Paris.
To get there, I was convinced the essential first step was finding a way to cooperate with China. Regrettably, China and the United States had been adversaries on this issue for decades. It was time to change the dynamic. I shared this thought with President Obama during our first meeting after he nominated me. He was enthusiastic. He had his own hopes for what we could do on climate change in his second term, but we both knew how tough it would be.
Four years before, in December 2009, I attended the UN climate negotiations in Copenhagen. The goal of the conference was to reach a global agreement on each nation’s reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. I had been to many of these conferences since the 1992 Rio conference. In Copenhagen, there was a new optimism about the United States’ engagement. But optimism wasn’t an outcome. While President Obama’s passion for climate action was a welcome change, there were tough issues to work through. First and foremost was the bifurcation of countries into “developed” and “developing” nations.
One of the principal reasons the 1997 Kyoto Protocol had failed is that it required much more from the United States and other developed nations and essentially nothing from developing countries, including major emitters like China and India. At the time, China was already the world’s number two polluter. Even though China promised it would undertake serious efforts, not signing up for a measurable—if not enforceable—reduction schedule simply wouldn’t do. We didn’t need all countries to take the exact same steps, but we certainly needed all countries to be taking some action toward a low-carbon future.
Another major hurdle was transparency. There was a huge trust deficit. Most delegates were not comfortable letting countries sign up for emissions reduction levels and then trusting them to follow through. We had experienced this starkly with the very first climate agreement, reached at the 1992 UNFCCC in Rio, which relied entirely on voluntary commitments and thus quickly fell apart. Ensuring that countries were transparent about the actions they were taking, and that their efforts were verifiable by third parties, was essential, we realized. This didn’t sit well with China, which informally led the bloc of developing nations. China viewed robust transparency measures as an infringement on its sovereignty.
While I was not part of the official negotiating team at Copenhagen—that was the prerogative of the State Department—as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I had a number of meetings with negotiators from both the American and foreign delegations. Their frustration was palpable. On every one of the major issues, they were making little progress. I knew from experience it wasn’t going to be easy—when you’re dealing with nearly two hundred countries, how can it be?—but the negotiations were even more constipated than I anticipated. The talks just weren’t going anywhere.
President Obama’s team had hoped a deal would be in hand by the time he touched down. Instead, he arrived in Copenhagen to find his work cut out for him. China and the so-called G77—the seventy-seven developing nations of the world—were stubbornly avoiding responsibility for major reductions. The president was forced to literally rush from meeting to meeting. He was conducting whirlwind personal diplomacy. To try to salvage some success in Copenhagen, he even crashed a meeting between the leaders of China, India, Brazil and South Africa. President Obama was able to convince his counterparts at least to come together around a list of principles. It became known as the Copenhagen Accord. But it was not the full-fledged agreement he intended.
In the environmental community, Copenhagen was generally deemed a failure. It did not augur well for urgently needed emissions reductions. But it did achieve two critical goals: First, the world’s major economies—developed and developing alike—agreed to make national commitments to reduce pollution. Second, they agreed to be transparent. This would at least be a building block for subsequent efforts.
Previous negotiations had established the next major deadline for agreement in Paris in 2015. The parties committed to try again for a global reduction of emissions. Achieving an agreement in Paris became the focus of all our energy.
During the years I was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I consistently talked to the Chinese about climate change. I met frequently with Xie Zhenhua, the Chinese minister in charge of climate negotiations. We met in China, in the United States, at conferences around the world, all of which steadily built a trusting, personal relationship. On one occasion, we actually met at a transient airport restaurant because of our travel schedules. In addition, I met with a number of high-level Chinese government officials, including Xi Jinping, who would soon become the nation’s president. They insisted that China grasped the urgency of the problem and was ready to be a partner. I know talk is cheap, but these many conversations made me believe there was an opening. I sensed a real partnership was possible.
Now I wanted to put it to the test as secretary of state.
When formally sworn in on February 1, 2013, one of my earliest meetings was with Todd Stern, the president’s climate envoy, and his team. I immediately asked for input on how we could expand climate cooperation between the United States and China. Todd was supportive, but when he realized I was talking about the expanded cooperation beginning in a matter of weeks or months, not years, he expressed skepticism. He argued that the UNFCCC process didn’t work like that—and neither did the Chinese. We had to start with baby steps—a decision to begin exploring areas of cooperation, for example—negotiated on the staff level, and then eventually the process would reach Todd’s level, and then, perhaps, it would be appropriate for the senior-most government officials to get involved. Danny Russel, who would a few months later become my assistant secretary for Asia, also warned that the Chinese way of doing anything was slow, steady and incremental. The Chinese tended to resist sudden, high-level decision-making. I valued their caution, but we didn’t have the luxury of time.
From my own experience, I knew China had a time-honored approach, but I also believed China was ready to do more. When then Chinese foreign minister Yang Jiechi reached out to congratulate me shortly after I was sworn in, I took the opportunity to explain my thinking. “China and the U.S. represent more than 45 percent of global emissions,” I told him. “If we find constructive ways to approach this, we can set an example for the world.” He agreed that U.S.-China climate cooperation would be good for both countries and the world. “I share your interests,” he said. “We need to work together.”
I spoke to Minister Yang again in the weeks before my first trip to China in April 2013. I told him I planned to come to Beijing with some thoughts on what we might be able to accomplish together.
I asked Todd and the team to draft a memo describing how China and the United States could embark on a special journey together. Todd politely said that I misunderstood how things worked, arguing that the Chinese wouldn’t want to be blindsided by our ideas in an in-person meeting with Yang, who by that point had been promoted to state councilor. Instead, Todd explained, they’d want any suggestions vetted with staff at lower levels. I worried that this was an invitation to bureaucratic inertia. It may have been the way things had been working, but I thought we needed to change the dynamic. I thought it would be a mistake to allow my first major bilateral visit to China to come and go without making real progress.
Todd relented. He sent me the memo I’d requested. I departed for China prepared to present it. On the flight out, as Danny Russel and I were reviewing the proposal, Danny again raised the risks of rushing the Chinese. I said I was comfortable with the conversation I had had with Yang. I trusted the relationship and personally believed we were not rushing them beyond their tolerance level.
When we arrived in China, I presented the ideas to Yang. To my delight, he was indeed receptive. By the end of that trip, two months into my tenure, together we launched the U.S.-China Climate Change Working Group (CCWG), a commitment of the world’s two largest emitters and economies to work together to significantly reduce the growth of global emissions. Three months after that, China and the United States approved five joint initiatives for the CCWG, focusing on a range of climate challenges, from the emissions of heavy-duty vehicles to the development of smart grids. Finally, we were approaching this global threat not as rivals, but as teammates.
It was a start. We had mended some of the wounds from years past. But I still felt we needed a major joint achievement to set us up for success two years later in Paris. I wanted us to be able to stand with the Chinese and announce a cooperative approach that could help lead the G77 and the developed world to success in Paris. One of our team members came up with a variation on that—building on the previous U.S. proposal that nations put forward their own individual emissions reductions targets before the 2015 COP. What if the United States and China set the bar for these targets by announcing our respective, ambitious goals together, when our presidents were scheduled to meet in Beijing late in 2014. I thought that could work, providing that the Chinese were prepared to make a sufficient effort.
It would reinforce the principle already adopted in prior negotiations of “common but differentiated” responsibility—an acceptance by the developed world that many countries were simply not able to afford the same approaches they could. We would each announce the best we could do. That would set the example we were looking for to all other nations. We would establish measurable but achievable goals, thereby inviting all countries to participate. It would also mean the United States would have to expedite the internal process for setting our own target, but if we were able to pull it off, the gridlock of developed versus developing could be behind us. We would come to Paris united, making our shared goal of reaching a comprehensive, global climate agreement much easier to achieve.
President Obama agreed, assuming, of course, we were able to convince the Chinese to develop ambitious targets so that we wouldn’t lose our established credibility. As long as their target was real and appropriate, we would be helping them to transition away from international criticism. Sharing the spotlight with the United States in such a positive way would also help to cement China’s journey to leader on the world stage. And most important, people in both nations would benefit from the elevated ambition—as would the world, providing we were setting the bar high enough. The Chinese like to frame policy proposals as win-wins, but sometimes what they put on the table is a win-lose in China’s favor. But on this occasion, our cooperation could produce a victory for everyone.
We spent the summer and early fall negotiating in secret. If anything leaked prematurely, the entire initiative might fall apart. In October 2014, a month before President Obama’s trip to China, I invited Yang Jiechi to Boston for a few days. I wanted his visit to be as productive and personal as possible. Some of us were worried that our efforts wouldn’t be complete in time for the president’s Beijing stop. After a morning work session, I hosted State Councilor Yang for lunch at Legal Sea Foods on the docks of Boston Harbor. I asked Todd Stern and John Podesta, President Obama’s counselor who was leading the White House preparations for the trip to China and was a principal advisor to the president on climate, to join us.
The luncheon location was not an accident. Just a few decades earlier, the harbor was a national environmental scandal, mocked by George H. W. Bush in his campaign for president in 1988. Fishing or swimming there was an invitation to disease. Now, after a $2 billion cleanup, the harbor was an economic asset for the city. I wanted to show Yang Jiechi that an environmental disaster could be transformed into an economic engine.
We met in a private room upstairs with a handful of other government officials. Standing on the balcony above the dock, we took in a spectacular view of the harbor. Then over lunch, we discussed our shared responsibility, given the size and power of our nations, to lead the world in responding to the threat of climate change. We spent hours together that afternoon, and while we had known each other for many years, after that, I think we both felt as though there was a new level of understanding between us. The Boston meeting helped crystallize preparations for the presidents to meet and make a powerful announcement. There were last-minute tensions over the targets, but with hard work from the State Department and important input from the White House, including a subsequent visit to China, the gaps were closed.
A month later, on Veterans Day, when President Obama and I were in Beijing, he and President Xi stood side by side and announced the respective target emissions reductions of our two nations. It was quite a moment: two countries that had long led opposing camps with respect to climate change standing together as partners in the face of the shared threat. There we were in one of the grand rooms of the Great Hall of the People, with the two most powerful presidents in the world making an improbable announcement. After so many years of hearing people say this could never happen and we were naive for even trying, after so many years of effort traveling to one COP after another, I finally felt we had reached a moment of turning. The crashes of Rio, Kyoto and Copenhagen melted into the past. Now, in Beijing, there was a real sense of possibility. We believed this day would galvanize countries everywhere to follow suit with their own ambitious targets. We wanted to send them a message: success in Paris was possible. The roadblocks we had hit for decades were finally starting to be removed.
• • •
AS THE DECEMBER 2015 date for convening in Paris approached, our goal was to keep up the momentum. The EU announced its target shortly after our U.S.-China joint announcement, which meant the three largest polluters in the world were out in front—a positive sign. But that still left the vast majority of the world’s countries silent. It became a top priority to get as many nations as possible to put their targets on the table in advance of Paris. Obviously, some nations lacked the resources necessary to develop ambitious and realistic targets, let alone craft and implement policies that would actually help them achieve those targets. Luckily, the United States was able to mobilize a deep bench of climate experts to assist those countries. We made extensive technical assistance available to help foreign governments arrive at emissions reduction levels, develop targets and devise strategies for sustainable development. We did this with the understanding that emissions anywhere threaten the future for people everywhere. We had a national interest in making sure the most ambitious targets possible were being set in every corner of the world.
The State Department team was able to track countries’ progress closely. I made sure it was on my counterparts’ radars as well, raising climate change in nearly every bilateral meeting I attended. At first, I would get funny looks from some of the ministers since, for many of them, climate change was not a topic dealt with by the foreign ministry. But, given the global security implications of climate change, in my view, it was an issue that should rise to the highest levels of all governments. With that conviction, each September I convened an annual climate-focused meeting of foreign ministers on the margins of the UN General Assembly. Before long, it was rare for me to find an interlocutor who wasn’t fully briefed on climate issues. It even reached the point where, frequently, I wasn’t the first to raise the topic.
As the date for the Paris talks neared, it was imperative we ensure our own house was in order as well. By this point, President Obama recognized there was little hope for a legislative fix in the United States to reduce carbon emissions. He decided he had no choice but to use his executive authority to launch the Clean Power Plan. That decision, in addition to other policies such as the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards targeting vehicles’ fuel consumption and the tax breaks for renewable energy investments, helped make certain we were on our way to cutting domestic emissions dramatically.
But we also needed to make changes to our climate change approach from a broader policy perspective. I had observed how our climate team essentially operated in its own silo at the State Department. Most of the regional bureaus didn’t have a thorough understanding of the issue, let alone the negotiations. One of the tools available to a secretary of state is the issuance of policy guidance cables that can be distributed to the entire department. I took immediate advantage of this practice to make climate change the focus of my first guidance cable. I set out my expectation that all diplomats become relatively fluent on the issue and directed all posts and bureaus to make the issue a priority in their day-to-day diplomatic work.
I also made the department’s work on climate change a key pillar of the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, which is designed to guide State Department planning from one administration to the next. This has resulted in, for example, climate-related modules being added to the training of new Foreign Service officers.
In the years to come, climate change will present an enormous number of challenges to our Foreign Service officers and posts all around the world. There will likely be large numbers of climate refugees as a result of drought, more intense storms, food shortages caused by catastrophic failure of crops, fires, water shortages, fish stock failures, sea-level rise, migration of species including human beings impacted by killer heat, new communicable diseases and failure of health systems to cope—just to name some of the challenges already manifesting themselves. And I was driven by the stark reality that even today, no country in the world is doing enough to live sustainably.
Because of our economic power, our military might and our values, all of which contribute to the responsible role we play in the world, the United States has traditionally led efforts to respond to global crises. Climate change is without question high on the list. The State Department needs to prioritize this threat. Every person in it needs to see the interconnection of all these issues. Choices that other governments make—all at the heart of diplomacy—will affect our country and our citizens.
• • •
WHEN THE WORLD gathered in Paris at the end of 2015, everyone knew the heads of state would not attend for the full negotiation. They were there to create momentum and kick-start the negotiating process. In addition to the opening day speech, President Obama spent a couple of days on the ground, meeting with a number of his counterparts, including, of course, President Xi of China and Prime Minister Modi of India. But, as expected, it’s hard to have productive conversations and manage the different agendas of 150 heads of state. It’s hard just to navigate the facilities and coordinate their staffs and security details. Most of the heads of state departed Paris within a day or two to leave us to our daily negotiating.
I was scheduled to be on hand for as much of the talks as possible. I had slugged it out at too many COPs over the years and waited a long time for the ripeness of this moment, to which we had already contributed by bringing China to the table. I did have to depart briefly for a couple of days in the middle of the two weeks in order to attend the annual NATO ministerial meeting in Brussels, at which we discussed our Afghanistan policy, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe ministerial meeting in Belgrade—but I returned immediately. Paris was the top priority with the promise for greatest global impact. We couldn’t lose the moment. All the parties were aware that the call to Paris had established a two-week period for the negotiations. The conference would conclude on December 11. The pressure was on.
When it came to expertise, the United States was armed to the teeth. In addition to my direct staff, Todd was there with the entire climate team. They were an extraordinary, dedicated band of devotees to the cause, having worked tirelessly for years to shepherd each step of the journey. Without them, there was no possibility of securing an agreement. We also had experts from the Environmental Protection Agency; the Departments of Treasury, Energy and Agriculture; and the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office. A number of White House officials remained on-site as well, including Brian Deese, who had succeeded John Podesta as Obama’s senior advisor on climate issues. I had first met Brian when he interned for me in the Senate. He had risen high and fast on smarts and good judgment. I was happy to be working with him again. Our team was a brilliant cadre, each person with his or her own unique proficiency. I couldn’t have been more confident in who was sitting behind the U.S. flag.
We knew coming in to Paris what the remaining biggest hurdles would be. But as the talks got under way, we got a feel for the developing dynamic. Every large negotiation like this gets caught in certain currents driven by regional leaders or by big countries with big interests. As we had hoped, the developing versus developed country dynamic was different from past COPs, but new challenges presented themselves. Instead of a head-to-head standoff between the United States and China, with everyone else casting their lot in one of our camps, our two nations were more or less in agreement. But that led some countries—in particular, the low-lying island states for which climate change was an existential threat—to worry that we would pursue a weak agreement that met our nations’ needs but not those of poorer nations.
It was a valid fear. Allaying it required careful diplomacy. I had met several times with the leaders of the small islands, as had President Obama. We had taken every opportunity possible to reassure them of our commitment to their future. To emphasize this, we also joined a coalition of nations spearheaded by the Marshall Islands, with a stated goal of reaching an ambitious agreement.
Still, while the United States certainly understood its responsibility as the world’s wealthiest nation and largest historical emitter, and we fully supported the so-called UN Green Climate Fund to help poorer nations grapple with climate change, we knew that we couldn’t return home with an agreement that legally required the United States to pay anything resembling reparations for the pollution we emitted before we fully understood the consequences. That was the ultimate nonstarter.
Resolving this issue was essential, but the U.S. negotiating team found Tuvalu’s chief negotiator to be particularly dug in. He was utterly intractable on the matter. The country’s prime minister, Enele Sopoaga, was seen to be more reasonable, but Sopoaga seemed to be held in check by his chief negotiator, who was typically in the meetings. Little progress was made. So we agreed that I should request to meet with him one-on-one, with no staff, and see if we could work something out.
I met with him and suggested we honor their need to take note of the loss-and-damage language, so important to them, by acknowledging it in the agreement, as Tuvalu and its negotiating partners wanted, but it would be placed in a different section of the agreement from where they had proposed. We would put the liability-and-compensation language, so important to us, front and center in the decision, where it was critical to make clear we were not creating a new cause of action exposing the developed world to a rash of lawsuits.
This compromise sounds simple now, but it was harder for some nations to swallow than others. As you would imagine, passions ran high among less developed nations, particularly island states whose existence was at stake but which had contributed next to nothing to the problem. They believed the most developed countries owed them compensation for damages. While we acknowledged that bad decisions—originally made out of ignorance, then in a stubborn refusal to accept facts—had contributed to the global problem, there was no way any wealthy country or soon-to-be wealthy country was going to sign up for liability and compensation. The breakthrough with Tuvalu was critical and welcome.
As the scheduled end of the talks approached, the French, who were not only hosting the conference but also serving as the rotating COP president, released initial drafts of agreement text. We raced to make copies and distribute them to all our experts, who took a half hour to read through it. Then the senior members of the delegation joined a dozen issue-area experts around the table in the U.S. office space and carefully analyzed what worked for the United States and what didn’t. While I wasn’t expected to be present, I found it particularly helpful to listen to the experts debate the impact of one provision or another. Hearing from the people who lived and breathed each of the respective sections was the best way for me to understand where we might have “give” and where we needed “take.”
Together, we continued to work toward the Friday, December 11, deadline. I connected with Todd in the morning and talked through which countries I needed to lobby that day. President Obama remained engaged from Washington, placing calls as needed to his counterparts, including Prime Minister Modi of India and President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil.
But by Thursday night, the progress we had been making stalled, and in some cases, we seemed to be going backward. I returned to my hotel around 11:00 p.m. to make a secure call to Washington, but the team, frustrated by what they were hearing in the negotiating hall, asked me to return there around midnight. Once I got there, I understood why: a meeting of all the parties had devolved once again into a debate over whether developed and developing countries should have different requirements. For a brief instant I feared the same argument that kept us divided for so many years and that the China outreach was meant to forever bury was now at the eleventh hour going to rear its ugly head. I sat among the delegates and listened for a while. Many of the faces around the table were new to the debate. Less developed countries were expressing their outrage that they were paying the price for developed nations whose economies had developed without regard to the impact of fossil fuels on the environment. Furthermore, now that everyone was negatively impacted, they didn’t believe the richer countries were bearing enough of the burden. To them, “common but differentiated” responsibility meant primarily defining the burden of the developed world. I sensed the potential for things to stay stuck.
We were seated around an enormous rectangular table, each of the sixty or so negotiators with several of their staff seated behind them in an outer ring around the table. I caught the eye of the chairperson and asked to be recognized. “I’m troubled by some of what I’ve been hearing,” I told them. I spoke, energized by all the years we had been through these arguments and by the stakes. I began by reminding people that for those of us who had been to prior COPs, this was an old debate. “It was in fact an argument that had produced nothing over the years. When we were in Kyoto we tried to have mandatory reductions in which the developed states did more than anyone, which was appropriate because they had indeed contributed more to the problem. But that crashed and burned because many countries—mine included—balked at the reality that certain states would do nothing even though they were increasingly contributing to the damage. Unless we share and all recognize responsibility, we will all unwittingly join in a suicide pact.” I then went on to the most critical point: “It was ludicrous to suggest that the agreement we are poised to adopt lacks differentiation to account for each country’s individual circumstances. The contributions we’re discussing are completely voluntary. They are determined by each nation. This agreement is actually the greatest monument to differentiation that you could imagine. Every nation decides for itself what it is willing to do and capable of doing!” We were so close. I urged the negotiators not to nitpick the agreement to death. “We are closer to something reasonable that all nations can accept than we have ever been before. Don’t let the ‘perfect’ be the enemy of the good.”
I went back to the hotel around 2:30 a.m. The talks were continuing at the expert level, so I requested my chief of staff, Jon Finer, stay behind to help keep things on track and call me if I needed to come back. The negotiations continued until 5:00 a.m. When Jon finally returned to the hotel, he was optimistic the text would come together within the next twenty-four hours. It seemed that the delegates drifted back to the core organizing principle of the Paris Agreement: each country would define its best efforts. We would not again make ourselves prisoners of mandatory reduction targets even though we all knew the urgency argued for them.
The next day was consumed by last-minute efforts to build consensus. It happened to be my birthday, and no one had any question about what I wanted. Minister Piyush Goyal of India, one of their chief negotiators, thoughtfully dropped by our office with a massive, tall bouquet of flowers. It was a wonderful gesture and even an indicator that we might get over our last hurdle with India. The negotiating continued into Friday night. Effectively we stopped the clock at midnight Friday and allowed ourselves to drift into Saturday. Then, around lunchtime on Saturday, December 12, the French released the final version of the agreement. As usual, we made copies, passed them around and sat quietly to review the text.
Todd was the first one to spot the error. On page twenty-one, a sentence that was supposed to read that developed nations “should” reduce emissions by whatever amount they proposed, instead read that developed nations “shall” reduce emissions by that amount. “Should” is an ambiguous word, without legal implications for missing our target. “Shall” means that coming short of our target would be a legal violation of the agreement, and by accepting that language, we would be crossing a line with Congress, which would not agree to mandatory reductions.
The should-for-shall swap was shocking and had to have been done purposely by someone, since we had spent ample time negotiating that very sentence—and all parties were ostensibly okay with “should” in the end. I immediately called Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, who was chairing the negotiations, and explained our alarm. He seemed genuinely surprised. He assured me he would fix the mistake immediately and look into how it happened.
Still, as we arrived in the main conference hall around 6:00 p.m., we weren’t sure what to expect. Had other countries been briefed on the last-minute should/shall debacle? Would anyone challenge it from the floor? I quickly found Minister Xie, the lead negotiator from China, who assured me they were okay with the text. India and South Africa were comfortable as well.
I noticed the head of the Nicaraguan delegation, Paul Oquist, at the front of the room, arguing with Fabius. Apparently, he wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to block the agreement, which he believed did not go far enough to help countries like his address the climate challenge. I talked to the Russians and Chinese and asked them to try to talk him off the ledge. They and others talked with him quietly on the side of the plenary. I then called the State Department Operations Center from my cell phone, which eventually connected me to the First Lady of Nicaragua. I explained the scene her representative was causing and softly reminded her that it would be unfortunate if Nicaragua was the only nation standing in the way of success in Paris. I don’t know whether she ended up reaching Oquist, but he ceased making a public spectacle. Shortly thereafter, Fabius grew tired of his antics and joined President Hollande and UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon onstage. He quickly explained the should/shall change to the plenary, made brief remarks about the text and said, finally, “I hear no objection.”
With that, he banged his gavel on the podium. “The Paris climate accord is adopted.”
I felt a swell of emotion as soon as the words left his mouth. Years of work for a lot of folks came to fruition at that moment. The floor of the plenary erupted, everyone shaking hands, hugging, offering congratulations. I looked around and saw elation on the faces of several thousand delegates and various advocates who had been laboring away for a long time. Somehow, we had done it. I posed for selfie after selfie as members of various delegations approached us. I shared congratulations with Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Al Gore, Laurent Fabius and his team, with whom we had worked so closely. Laurent had been focused and disciplined as the chair, managing many delegations with skill and good diplomacy.
When the exuberance on the floor dulled down to a steady murmur, the chair recognized a few of us to speak to the moment. When my turn arrived, I cautioned the room that for all the accomplishment and significance of what we achieved, we needed to remind ourselves: we were not leaving Paris with a guarantee that we would hold Earth’s temperature increase to two degrees centigrade—the goal we set in the agreement. The real importance of our achievement was the message we were sending to the world’s private sector that 196 nations were now committed to move in the same direction on energy policy. That message, we hoped, would unleash a torrent of investment into sustainable, alternative and renewable energy. Why? Because the solution to climate change is energy policy, and the technology we have today could, if deployed rapidly enough, solve the crisis. We were betting on the genius of the entrepreneur to recognize that public policy was reinforcing the largest market the world has ever known, a market today of four to five billion energy users worth multitrillions of dollars, which would be growing over the next thirty years to nine billion users and worth multiples of those trillions. No burden was placed by government on anyone. It was an invitation to the marketplace to get the job done and make money doing it. That was the real success of the Paris Agreement. Paris was inviting the private sector to save us from ourselves.
I returned to my hotel around 11:00 p.m. to scarf down a quick dinner before heading to a TV studio nearby to pretape a round of interviews with the hosts of the various Sunday news shows. It was important to define for ourselves what had been accomplished—and what had not—rather than having others do it for us. I was exhausted, but we had just concluded an agreement decades in the making. I was happy to share the good news.
For a moment, I wondered why we couldn’t do the interviews live the following day, but then I remembered that I was scheduled to be on my way to Rome at 7:00 a.m. for meetings on the deteriorating political situation in Libya. From there, it was on to Moscow to discuss Syria.
As was often the case during my four years as secretary of state, a good night’s sleep would have to wait.
• • •
A FEW MONTHS later, on April 22, 2016—Earth Day—I was at the UN in New York to formally sign the Paris Agreement on behalf of President Obama and the United States. It was a deeply emotional day—made more so by the fact that my daughter Alex, who lived in New York at the time, was there to share it with me, along with my two-year-old granddaughter, Isabelle.
Before I arrived at the UN, I stopped for a moment to reflect on the history that brought us to that day. I thought about the first Earth Day in 1970, when I joined with millions of Americans in teach-ins to educate the public about the environmental challenges we faced. I thought about the inaugural UN climate conference in Rio, where I first talked at length with my future wife, Teresa. I thought of the urgency we all felt back then in 1992. And of course, I thought about the many ups and downs in the climate fight that led us to that December night at Le Bourget, when it seemed—for the first time—that the world had finally found the path forward.
But as I sat and played with my granddaughter in the green room behind the lectern, waiting for my turn to go out and sign the agreement, I wasn’t thinking of the past. I thought about the future. Her future. The world her children would one day inherit.
I was holding Isabelle in my arms, joking with her, when I was told the United States of America had been called to sign the document. Before her mom knew it, Isabelle and I ventured out onstage. A wave of applause surprised me as people reacted to Isabelle’s presence. They were responding just as I had a few moments earlier. This was about her and the nearly two billion children around the world under the age of fifteen. Isabelle never flinched. She didn’t cringe at the sudden exposure to a full General Assembly Hall. She seemed fascinated by it all. With Isabelle sitting on my left knee, I signed the document, stood up and walked over to the edge of the stage, where her mother was observing. When I put Isabelle back in her mother’s open arms, Isabelle announced firmly, “Mummy, I no sign paper,” somehow thinking she got cheated out of her role. Little did she or any of us know the impact she had without her signature.
Since then, people from all walks of life, all over the world, have told me how that moment moved them too. They were reminded of their own children and grandchildren, they explained. They too thought of the future.
• • •
MY LOVE AFFAIR with the ocean began when I was three years old. I’ve seen a number of photos of myself at that age, playing in the light waves near the shore of Naushon with a small plastic shovel and bucket. I was mesmerized by the live snails, the razor clams and the occasional schools of shrimp washing in and out with the rhythm of the water. My mother had to drag me in for dinner. As I got older, I lived in a bathing suit. I loved the smell of the sea air, the screeching squawk of seagulls swooping in to scavenge dead fish or exposed clams at low tide. There was a perceptible pattern to life by the sea. At a remarkably young age I formed a bond with the ocean that eventually led me to the Navy and life always near the water.
While I was introduced early to the beautiful complexity of the world under the sea—three-quarters of the planet is covered by oceans—it wasn’t until my work on climate change that I began to fully understand the complex synergy that makes up this yet to be fully understood relationship between man and ocean.
What I do know is that the oceans are responsible for life as we know it: 51 percent of the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean. The currents of the ocean are critical to temperature and weather. The greenhouse effect itself is the temperature regulator of Earth, which until recently helped keep Earth’s temperature at a livable average of 57 degrees Fahrenheit.
Now all of that is changing. The water is warming. The ice is melting. Spawning grounds for fisheries are being overrun by rising sea levels. Acidity from increased greenhouse gas emissions is bleaching coral, killing reefs and changing the basic ecosystem. Almost every major fishery is at peak fishing or fished out because there is too much money chasing too few fish.
It’s not just climate change that needs urgent attention. The oceans are at risk. I know that seems implausible because they are so vast and powerful. But the reality is humans are dumping so much garbage, plastic, chemicals, raw sewage and runoff from agriculture and development that the oceans are in increasing numbers of places just overwhelmed. There are over five hundred dead zones in the oceans today—and increasing. The danger is that we don’t fully understand the impact of all that we are doing, but since it is a living ecosystem, the last thing we should be willing to tolerate would be passing a tipping point. We are strip-mining the oceans. We are exploiting the fish stocks that have sustained life for generations. On the high seas, there is no enforcement.
Just as with climate change, the threats facing our ocean can only be addressed with widespread global cooperation. I was determined to try to advance that cooperation as secretary. We traveled a huge distance to elevate awareness of the oceans—to make them a matter of international governmental focus—not just the domain of nongovernmental voices struggling to be heard.
Shortly after I arrived at Foggy Bottom, I asked the team to begin planning a global summit that would help to bring the world together to drive that kind of cooperation. I envisioned a high-level conference, with every participant bringing a concrete commitment to the table—whether it be a plan to detect and prosecute illegal fishing, a new policy to help reduce plastic pollution or expanded research programs to help us better understand the chemical changes the ocean is experiencing because of climate change.
This wasn’t a directive the State Department’s career employees had been anticipating, and at first there was some confusion about what, exactly, I was thinking. They tried hard to accommodate my unusual request. We worked together to develop a conference that would be different—not just to beat the drum for those who were already focused on ocean protection, but to elevate the health of our oceans to the highest levels of government. Much as we were doing with climate change, we wanted to sound the alarm on the dire state of the ocean and drive real action—the kind of action that could only come with high-level attention in capital cities from pole to pole and around the equator.
The team at the State Department embraced the mission. Getting my foreign counterparts to pay attention was another challenge. Some—like Norwegian foreign minister Børge Brende—were eager to join from the start. He was already a leader. But it wasn’t an issue area many foreign ministries were accustomed to handling. It took persuasion and recruitment.
We hosted the first Our Ocean conference at the State Department in 2014, and it was more successful than I had anticipated, with governments committing to formally protect more than four million square kilometers of ocean water, among other things. Chile volunteered on the spot to host the second Our Ocean conference in Valparaíso in 2015, and I held the third conference back at the State Department in 2016, which President Obama keynoted and which more than two dozen foreign ministers or heads of state attended. By the time we left, the Our Ocean conferences generated more than $9 billion in pledges to protect the ocean from everything from plastic pollution to illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing. Nations also set aside an additional ten million square kilometers as formal Marine protected areas—collectively, a swath of ocean water roughly the size of the United States. We attacked illegal fishing and created a digital tracking system to ensure accountability on the high seas.
The most auspicious thing to come out of those conferences, however, was the momentum they generated: in 2017, the EU hosted the fourth annual Our Ocean conference, and Indonesia, Norway and Palau have each committed to hosting future iterations of the conference, ensuring that year after year global leaders will come forward to take stock of the progress made to date and put forth new commitments. The health of our oceans is getting international attention; it is up to everyone now to sustain it.
• • •
DURING HIS FINAL year in office, President Obama made it clear to the cabinet he expected us to “run through the tape.” That certainly included our efforts on climate change. For the next several months, we worked hard to corral China and as many of our international partners as possible to quickly bring the Paris Agreement permanently into force. We accomplished our goal less than a year after it was gaveled in—far faster than even the most optimistic among us might have predicted.
The Paris Agreement will last beyond what any one U.S. president chooses to do because it addresses a growing threat understood and acknowledged by responsible leaders around the world and, most important, gives each nation the opportunity to design its own approach. Precisely for that reason, many argue it doesn’t go far enough because we are currently on track to hit four degrees centigrade in this century. But it does give us a foundation of nationally determined climate goals on which we can build. It provides support to countries that need help meeting the targets. It leaves no country to weather the storm of climate change alone. It marshals an array of tools in order to help developing nations invest in infrastructure and technology and the science to get the job done. It supports the most vulnerable countries so they can better adapt to the climate impacts that many of those countries are already confronting. And it enables us to ratchet up ambition over time as technology develops and as the price of clean energy comes down. The agreement calls on the parties to revisit their national pledges every five years in order to ensure that we keep pace with the technology and that we accelerate the global transition to a clean energy economy. This process—a cornerstone of the Paris Agreement—gives us a framework that is built to last and a degree of global accountability that has never before existed.
The environmental progress we made in 2016 alone extends well beyond Paris. For example, international aviation wasn’t covered by what we did in Paris. If that sector were a country, it would rank among the top dozen greenhouse gas emitters in the world. So in early October 2016, with U.S. support, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) established a sector-wide agreement for carbon-neutral growth.
A few weeks later, I traveled to Kigali, Rwanda, to work with representatives from nearly two hundred countries to phase down the global production and use of hydrofluorocarbons, greenhouse gases that are less common but thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide. In part because much of the world was paying little attention to the negotiations, they were tougher than we had anticipated. I remember one particularly prickly meeting with the Indian delegation. The rest of the parties had essentially agreed on the text, but the Indians were pushing hard for what we viewed as a totally unreasonable change. Finally, I told their minister, “President Obama is going to call Prime Minister Modi later today. He can either call to explain how the Indian delegation single-handedly prevented the nearly two hundred parties from reaching an agreement, or he can call to thank him for his cooperation in addressing a matter of such global concern.” In the end, we resolved the dispute, but tensions had been so high that when we realized we finally had a deal, both of our delegations spontaneously broke into applause in the small room in which we had been cloistered. In the end, we succeeded—and the so-called Kigali Amendment could single-handedly help us avoid an entire half-degree centigrade of warming by the end of the century, while at the same time opening up new opportunities for growth in a range of industries.
Our last year in office, 2016, was a banner year for climate diplomacy. With Paris, Kigali and ICAO, we hit an environmental trifecta. It was the single most effective year for the environment I can remember since groundbreaking legislation was passed in the early 70s. President Obama’s focus paid off. Every one of these steps combined to move the climate discussion in the right direction. Global leaders finally seemed to wake up to the enormity of the climate challenge. There was hope the international community might actually do what is necessary to meet this generational test.
• • •
I SPENT ELECTION Day 2016 on our military plane, headed to New Zealand with my team. Our communications were shoddy as we flew over the Pacific, but from time to time my friends in Boston or Washington would email me the latest exit polls. Every so often I’d wander out into the main cabin and share the news with my senior staff. “I know a thing or two about exit polls,” I reminded them. “Let’s see how it goes.”
By the time we landed in Christchurch, it was clear that Donald J. Trump was going to be our next president. As a few members of my team and I watched his victory speech in my hotel suite, I tried to process what a Trump victory would mean for so much of the progress we had made during the Obama administration. More than anything else, I was worried about what President Trump would do—or not do—to fight climate change. The prospect of a climate change denier in the White House was the last thing the planet needed.
A few days after the 2016 election, I was headed to Marrakesh, Morocco, for the first COP since Paris. My speechwriter and I had been working on a “tough love” speech—a “don’t think the hard work is behind you” speech—underscoring the need for countries to hold one another accountable to the goals we had set the previous year. Obviously, that would no longer work. The United States had just elected as president a man who described climate change as a “hoax perpetrated by the Chinese.” The world’s climate experts and negotiators needed to hear why they should have any faith at all that the agreement would endure.
So we rewrote the speech. And when I got to Marrakesh, I reminded the climate community of how far we had come together and how impossible it would be for any one leader to reverse the transition toward clean energy—a transition that, thanks in large part to Paris, was already under way. I expressed my hope that perhaps a President Trump would be more responsible than a candidate Trump had been. And I stressed to them why our shared efforts were so important: nothing less than the future world our children and grandchildren will inherit is at stake. “It’s important to remind ourselves that we are not on a preordained path to disaster,” I told the packed room. “It’s not written in the stars. This is about choices—choices that we still have. This is a test of willpower, not capacity. It’s within our power to put the planet back on a better track. But doing that requires holding ourselves accountable to the hard truth. It requires holding ourselves accountable to facts, not opinion; to science, not theories that can’t be proven—and certainly not to political bromides.”
I was on the ground in Morocco for less than twenty-four hours, but while I was there, I asked Jonathan Pershing (no relation to Dick), who had by then replaced Todd as our special envoy for climate change, if he could gather the whole U.S. negotiating team together. I wanted to talk to them.
When I walked into the room Pershing had reserved, I looked around at the amazing group of public servants who had dedicated so much of their careers to solving this challenge. The excited smiles I had seen on their faces in Paris had been replaced by solemn expressions. They didn’t know what to expect.
I was candid with them. I said that I didn’t know what to expect either. But I told them that even if Trump followed through on his campaign pledge to abandon the Paris Agreement—even if he walked away from renewable energy and started subsidizing coal and other fossil fuels—even if he took every step imaginable to reverse the progress we had made, as was his prerogative—even then, so much of what we had achieved would continue. In 2017, 75 percent of the new electricity coming online in the United States came from solar. Coal contributed 0.2 percent. Even a President Trump cannot undo what the marketplace is doing.
The energy market was moving in the right direction. The international community was committed. Prime ministers and presidents everywhere understood the challenge like never before—and so, by the way, did American mayors and governors and business leaders. The world would take on the climate threat, with or without the support of the president of the United States.
• • •
TODAY I FEEL myself growing increasingly angry as ideology and cheap, lowest-common-denominator politics destroy what is left of America’s leadership on this issue. I feel as if someone else’s ignorance and demagoguery is stealing the future from my children and grandchildren, from the planet itself.
My mind keeps flashing back to my trip to Antarctica. To really see and understand the full magnitude of the climate threat, you have to go there. I was the first secretary of state and the highest-ranking U.S. official to ever make the trip. I flew by helicopter over the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. I walked out onto the Ross Sea ice shelf. I flew to McMurdo Station in Antarctica to see and understand even better what is taking place.
Antarctica contains multiple ice sheets that are, in some places, three miles deep or more. If we are irresponsible about climate change and all that ice melts, then sea levels would rise somewhere between one hundred and two hundred feet in the next couple of centuries. For the past fifty years, climate scientists have believed just the West Antarctic Ice Sheet alone is a sword of Damocles, hanging over our entire way of life. Large chunks, including one the size of Rhode Island, have already broken off and drifted out to sea. Should the entire ice sheet break apart and melt into the sea, it alone could raise global sea levels by four to five meters.
Standing there, the power of God’s creation was unmistakable. Each of the three great Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Islam and Christianity) calls on believers to protect creation. Every values-based approach to life, every philosophy, talks of our responsibility to each other and to creation. The first inhabitants of North America, Native Americans, maintained a beautiful balance with elements around them.
But if religion isn’t enough to stir your conscience, science certainly must. In Antarctica, I listened to the scientists who are on the front lines, not politicians or pundits, but people whose entire lives are dedicated to extensive research and who draw conclusions based on facts, not ideology. They were all clear: the more they learn, the more alarmed they become about the speed with which these changes are happening.
A scientist from New Zealand named Gavin Dunbar described what they’re seeing as the “canary in the coal mine” and warned that some thresholds, if we cross them, cannot be reversed. The damage we inflict could take centuries to undo, he said, if it can be undone at all.
The scientists in Antarctica told me that they are still trying to figure out how quickly this change is happening. But they know for certain that it is happening, and it’s happening faster than they previously thought possible. An American glacial geologist, a fellow whose name is appropriately enough John Stone, didn’t mince words when he told me, “The catastrophic period could already be under way.”
For anyone who cares about the world and our future, those words should be more than sobering; for a diplomat or a leader, no matter who is in the White House, science and fact must be motivating—while there’s still time to act.