John Kerry’s New Bipartisan, Star-Studded ‘War’ on Climate Change
As for the sordid saga of American politics and climate change, John Kerry has not quite seen it all, but he has seen a whole lot of it.
He was there in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, when the first global climate treaty was negotiated. Four years later, he was denouncing President George W. Bush from the Senate floor after he withdrew the United States from that pact. In 2009, Kerry was one of three bipartisan senators who tried—and failed—to pass an ambitious climate bill. As secretary of state in 2014, he negotiated the first climate agreement between the United States and China. It cleared the way, in 2015, for the global Paris Agreement, which he also helped negotiate. Somewhere in this two-decade period he also ran for president.
This weekend, Kerry returned to the breach, joining with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former Republican governor of California, to launch a new bipartisan group that aims to unify the public behind climate action. It is named World War Zero, a reference both to its goal of an American economy with net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, and to the wartime-style mass mobilization that Kerry says can get us there.
[Read: Why solving climate change will be like mobilizing for war]
Other than that mid-century goal, though, World War Zero will not endorse any particular candidate or climate policy. (, its supporters are split on the virtues of fracking.) Instead, it aims to offer a unifying story that can anchor other efforts, focused
