December 9, 2015
Statement of CIEL President Carroll Muffett:
Secretary Kerry’s announcement that the United States will double its grant-based adaptation assistance from $400 to more than $800 million by 2020 is a welcome step. However, the figure pales in comparison to the $100 billion per year that developed countries pledged to mobilize by 2020 to support climate mitigation and adaptation efforts in the developing world.
The modest US offering to support climate action and justice – like the similarly inadequate emissions reductions the United States has brought to the global table – is blamed on US domestic internal politics. The world has waited a quarter century for the US to address these dynamics and reengage fully, fairly, and ambitiously with the international climate process.
In this context, it was deeply unfortunate to hear Secretary Kerry declare that what happens in Paris is important, “but still only a preamble.”
Secretary Kerry recognized the profound costs of our reliance on fossil fuels: “unimaginable environmental and agricultural devastation”, hospitalizations, millions of premature deaths. He acknowledged the profound human impact of the recent flooding in Chennai, India and the reality that unprecedented disasters of this kind are no longer unprecedented – they are becoming routine. And he observed that “We knew this was coming.”
We know climate change is here. We are living the story of climate change because of the failures of the past. For growing millions of people, that story is an unequivocal tragedy – of violated human rights and lost human lives. Twenty-five years into the climate treaty, we should be writing the final chapters of this tragedy. Not the preamble.
Secretary Kerry acknowledged that, if we refuse to rise to this challenge “[i]f we continue to allow calculated obstruction to derail the urgency of this moment – we will be liable of collective moral failure of historic consequences.” The question remains whether and when the United States will rise properly to that challenge. Responding to the climate crisis demands an urgency and an acceptance of scientific and human realities that we have yet to see in the United States’ participation here in Paris.