Donald Trump said wind turbines are "a major loser." John Kerry, standing in a Turkish resort city where almost every other country on Earth showed up to discuss the planet cooking itself, said Trump should find a really big mirror. The United States sent nobody to Cop31, which is a bold strategy for a man who keeps claiming he wants to beat China.
The Mirror Line
Speaking at the Cop31 climate summit in Antalya, Kerry told The Guardian that the first thing Trump's team should do is "hold up a really big mirror so he can look at a loser, because he's the biggest loser we've seen in a long time on all of these issues."
That was a direct reply to Trump's own words on Monday. Discussing potential legislation to make new energy projects easier to build, the president announced, "I will not approve wind turbines because wind turbines are a major loser."
So the man who has built a lifelong brand on calling other people losers got the word handed back to him by a former secretary of state. Trump started this particular fight. Kerry just finished it with a mirror.
Everyone Came But Us
Cop31 started on Monday. Almost every country in the world sent a delegation. The Trump administration sent none.
The White House confirmed it would not send anyone, and a White House official explained why: "This summit rejects reality by failing to acknowledge that extremist climate policies are destroying countries around the world."
Read that again. The official's position is that the reality-rejecting party is the one holding a summit about measurable warming, and not the administration that has previously called climate science a "hoax." The United States has withdrawn from the international climate process altogether, which means the world's second-largest emitter has chosen to hear about the plan secondhand, like a guy who skipped the group project and wants the grade anyway.
Walking Off the Battlefield
Kerry's sharpest point was not about the planet. It was about winning. "He declared he wanted to beat China, be number one in X, Y, or Z, and he walked away from the battlefield," Kerry said. "He totally took America out of that sector."
Here's the thing. China dominates clean tech. Under Biden, the US passed sweeping legislation with tax breaks for clean energy and electric vehicle manufacturing specifically to compete with that dominance. Republicans then eliminated most of that support.
The replacement plan was tariffs on assorted goods and public money to prop up struggling coal-fired power plants. Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel there is. Kerry's argument is that the US could have been a supply chain for these industries and a marketplace for American-made goods. Instead, the country that wants to be number one has decided to compete in the sector everyone else is leaving.
The Rest of the World Is Not Waiting
Meanwhile, the rapid growth of renewables has helped prevent a significant amount of fossil fuel power from coming online, and global emissions edged down slightly last year. That is real progress, and it is happening without American leadership.
It is also nowhere near enough. Far deeper cuts are needed to avoid catastrophic climate change, and UN secretary general António Guterres told the summit it was "long past time" to phase out fossil fuel use.
Greta Thunberg, who arrived in Antalya on Tuesday, was characteristically unimpressed with the whole affair. "Cops have become greenwashed circuses," she said. "That is the reality." She has a point about the dawdling. After years of talks, the central cause of the crisis is still barely on the agenda. At least the circus has a tent. The US administration is not even in the parking lot.
Kerry Says the Midterms Noticed
Kerry also made a political claim worth watching. He acknowledged that climate was not the central issue in the recent US midterm elections, but argued that concern about global heating overlapped with alarm over rising energy costs, and that this drove voters toward the Democrats.
"I think we will have a number of candidates who will have this high on the agenda," he said of the victorious Democrats. "And all of the analysis that I've seen, I mean real analysis, has said this was one of the issues that counted."
Take that with appropriate salt. Kerry is a Democrat and a longtime climate envoy, and he is not a neutral observer of his own issue. He also conceded that politicians need to talk about the climate crisis differently to engage the public. Which, for a party that has spent decades speaking in the language of a federal budget appendix, is the most useful thing he said all week.
The Dingo Take
The administration skipped a global summit, called wind power a loser, and sent a statement saying everyone else is the one rejecting reality. That is the whole policy, and it fits on a bumper sticker.
Kerry is not wrong that this is a competitiveness problem, and that is the part that should keep Trump's own voters up at night. You can believe whatever you want about the climate and still look at China's clean-tech dominance and ask who is going to build the things the world is buying. The answer under this plan is not us. Propping up coal plants with public money while your chief rival sells the rest of the planet its power is not toughness. It is a very expensive way to lose.
And yes, Kerry's mirror line is gloriously petty, and yes, it is also accurate. Trump has spent his career deciding who the losers are. Now he is skipping the biggest energy competition on Earth and calling the winning technology a loser. History has a way of handing that word back. Kerry just did it a little early.
Comments