John Kerry Is Stepping Down as Climate Envoy at Age 80. He Isn’t Going Quietly.

When John Kerry recently decided to step down as the U.S. special envoy for climate—ending a yearslong marathon of globe-trotting and 11th-hour negotiations—his daughter suggested organizing a get-together to mark the occasion.

The 80-year-old statesman bristled at the notion of taking a final bow. “Hey, I’m not quitting. I’m not retiring,” Kerry recalled telling her. “I don’t want to view this with finality of some kind.”

Letting go of public office is hard, at any age, especially when you see your job as saving the planet. Kerry has been instrumental in driving the transition to renewable energy, prodding Wall Street and the oil industry to unleash billions in green investments. And for more than a decade, he has been on the front lines of the unruly process for implementing the landmark Paris accord, which seeks to limit global warming and stave off the most catastrophic effects of climate change.

Kerry is stepping down Wednesday as that fight is on a knife’s edge. Record heat in January for the first time pushed the earth’s 12-month average temperature over 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels—a key threshold of the Paris agreement. China, the world’s biggest greenhouse-gas emitter, is rolling out renewable energy infrastructure at an unprecedented scale while also continuing to burn copious amounts of coal.

In the U.S., the Biden administration has unleashed hundreds of billions in subsidies that aim to green the economy, but a presidential election is only months away. Donald Trump—who as president pulled the U.S. out of the Paris accord—is leading the polls and, if he wins, says he wants the U.S. “drilling like you have never seen before.”

Looming over the election is the question of whether 81-year-old President Biden—and to a lesser degree 77-year-old Trump—are simply too old to hold the country’s highest office. Age didn’t drive Kerry’s decision to leave. Staying in his post, Kerry said in an interview, didn’t make sense in an election year when a gridlocked Congress is unlikely to take action on the climate or any other issue.

John Podesta, Biden’s senior adviser for global climate policy, is slated to take over Kerry’s duties. Then Kerry plans to hit the road as a private citizen, dropping in on a major oil industry conference in Houston to press energy executives to join the ranks of other business leaders throwing their weight behind the transition. Companies are now deeply invested in green technologies, Kerry says, creating momentum that no one can stop, not even Trump.

“While someone could disrupt and can get in the way a bit, they’re not going to end this transition,” he says.

Kerry’s signature mane has whitened over the years, but he hasn’t lost his command of policy details. In the middle of conversation he will recite paragraphs of legalese—drawn from paragraph 28 of the latest U.N. climate agreement, he notes—or rattle off the number of gigawatts of renewable power China expects to install by the end of the decade. He cites analyst reports estimating the energy transition will require investments of up to $5 trillion annually for the next 30 years.

“I think that helping to deploy the money necessary to do the R&D, to bring to scale some of these projects, to accelerate the transition, I think that’s where the action is,” Kerry said. “I feel very energized, super focused.”

But some of Kerry’s counterparts in capitals across the globe worry his departure from government marks the end of a distinctly inclusive era in climate negotiations. Kerry’s clout as a longtime senator and the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, officials say, allowed him to bring disparate parties to the table and navigate political land mines. His diplomacy with China fueled criticism from Republicans while his outreach to oil executives such as Exxon Chief Executive Darren Woods and Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, head of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, angered climate activists.

“There’s no solution if we don’t get everyone on board,” said Dan Jorgensen, Denmark’s minister for global climate policy and a key negotiator at the annual United Nations conference of parties, or COP, meetings. Kerry, Jorgensen said, “is a very skilled man when it comes to knowing the character of people and finding out who to trust and who not to trust.”

One person Kerry trusts is 74-year-old Xie Zhenhua, China’s climate envoy. The men have known each other for decades, crossing paths at conferences, lunching during airport layovers and meeting each other’s grandchildren. When Kerry was secretary of state under President Obama, he hammered out an agreement with Xie that laid the groundwork for the U.S. and China to sign the Paris accord in 2015.

Making further progress on climate change, Kerry said, hinged on both sides agreeing to treat the issue separately from the myriad tensions dividing Washington and Beijing. That meant setting aside disagreements over Taiwan as well as Beijing’s treatment of Hong Kong and the ethnic Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in China’s Xinjiang region.

“These are serious issues, and they are issues of contention,” Kerry said. “But on the other hand, both Xie Zhenhua and I believe that climate was not a bilateral issue, that it’s a global issue.”

After becoming climate envoy in early 2021, Kerry flew to Shanghai, landing in the dead of night in a chartered plane. He was met by a cadre of 20 technicians covered head-to-toe in protective gear that Kerry described as “moonsuits.” China’s zero-Covid policy was in place, so each delegation stayed in separate wings of a resort that had been cleared out for the talks. When they met, Kerry and Xie were seated opposite each other at a large table, more than 12 feet apart. “It was quite a distance,” Kerry said.

China was dug-in on defending its status under U.N. climate accords that designate the country as a developing nation, meaning the country isn’t expected to transition as quickly as the U.S. and other developed countries that historically pumped the bulk of emissions into the atmosphere. Wealthy countries, unlike China, are also expected under the accords to fund the transition of developing countries.

“China very forcefully asserted its status as a developing country, which we obviously had some disagreements about since they’re the number two economy in the world,” Kerry said.

China wasn’t going to move the timeline of its pledge—to make its carbon-dioxide emissions peak before 2030—a time frame critics say is too slow. But there was room to negotiate on other emissions such as methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

A breakthrough came last October when China, despite its developing country status, committed roughly $100 billion for its own overseas climate projects. A month later, Kerry and Xie met in Sunnylands, Calif., and the two agreed to rein in methane emissions across their respective economies.

Xie would also prove a valuable ally when negotiators from around the globe convened for COP28 in Dubai last December. The choice of Dubai—a hub of oil-enriched Gulf states—as host was contentious, and the selection of Al Jaber as COP28’s president was even more so.

Al Gore told a TED talk that Al Jaber had a “blatant conflict of interest” as CEO of Abu Dhabi’s oil company, saying the fossil-fuel industry has “brazenly seized control of the COP process.”

Kerry disagreed. He was an early backer of Al Jaber, arguing that his ties to the oil world would make him an asset in the negotiations. “I thought that if we’re really going to get something done, you can’t leave people who are critical to solving the problem out in the cold,” Kerry said.

Kerry’s 80th birthday happened to land during COP28, and Al Jaber surprised him with a party of cake, juice and attendees from around the world, including Xie, Jorgensen recalled. By then, Western negotiators were pushing for an agreement that would call for a worldwide phaseout of fossil-fuels.

OPEC’s secretary-general warned such a move would have “irreversible consequences,” adding that it was “unacceptable that politically motivated campaigns put our people’s prosperity and future at risk.”

In the closing days of the conference, a draft agreement circulated that excised any mention of a fossil-fuel phaseout, leaving the talks on the verge of collapse.

“We were all very depressed,” Jorgensen said.

Al Jaber summoned negotiators to a closed-door session around midnight. Given the late hour, Jorgensen didn’t expect much turnout from high-level officials as their bleary-eyed lieutenants filed in.

“I remember when I walked into the room and I saw John was there, I was relieved because I knew this was going to be an extremely important meeting,” he said.

Kerry took the floor telling the negotiators how there aren’t many times in a politician’s career—even a long one—when you can really make a difference in the world, but this was one of those moments, Jorgensen recalled.

Negotiators went back to the drawing board, hammering out an agreement that called for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner.” The document sent an unprecedented signal to the global economy that governments were intent on cutting back on coal, oil and natural gas.

The agreement was also, perhaps, the climax of the Kerry-Xie tandem. Xie, who had suffered a stroke in early 2023, was stepping down as envoy and returning to academia in China, Kerry said.

Kerry said he and Xie have agreed to continue working together in “an emeritus fashion” doing track two diplomacy that can provide options to those doing the actual negotiating. He added: “How can you have this absolutely critical global security issue, which does affect national security, affects food, life, everything—how do you just go put your feet up and say, ‘I’m wrapping?’ That’s just incomprehensible to me.”

Write to Stacy Meichtry at [email protected]