On Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Alex Wagner Tonight,” Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry told countries that say they need fossil fuels for development that “they have to buy into this transformation” that he acknowledged “the private sector’s restrained against investing” in, “partly just out of concern, not confident.”
Guest host Ayman Mohyeldin asked, “I was interviewing the Iraqi prime minister today, who’s desperate to get his country’s economy back on track after 20 years of war, but at the same time, a lot of it goes through fossil fuel. How do you convince a leader like the Iraqi prime minister, and other countries around the world, who desperately seek economic progress through fossil fuel, which is the largest part of their economy, to not do that because the rest of us –?”
Kerry responded, “It is today, but they have to buy into this transformation. They have to recognize what — the UAE has a national oil company…and the UAE is an oil-producing, gas-producing country. But 15 or 20 years ago, the UAE saw the future and made the decision they have to begin to diversify. What we need is, the old energy companies need to begin to become new energy companies, and that means to transform somewhat. A lot of them are, some of them aren’t. Others are choosing to do the things they know how to do, which is to perhaps capture emissions or extract and put back into the earth, to bury it forever. But the marketplace is going to decide who the winners and who the losers are here. The key is that a big energy oil and gas company, ought to just transform into an energy company. And many are trying to do that right now. They are chasing green hydrogen. They’re working on new products that are capable of providing the marketplace with a whole set of different choices. Electric vehicles are coming online at record pace. The fact is that the demand for fossil fuels is actually going down to some degree now and will be markedly by the end of this decade. So, that change, good CEOs are realizing the future is going to be defined in a clean energy economy and they’re making that commitment.”
Later, he added, “[W]e have to solve the problem of finance. We must come up with a way to deploy the trillions of dollars that are needed for this transformation. The U.N. estimates that we need to have about, two-and-a-half to four-and-a-half trillion dollars a year for the next 30 years. We have that money in the private sector, but the private sector’s restrained against investing, partly just out of concern, not confident. So, we’re learning how to de-risk that money. And if we can find a number of mechanisms come to fruition, at the COP in Dubai, we will be in a position to be able to leap forward in deploying money, and we’ll win the battle.”
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