You have been fighting for climate protection for decades – and yet you are always disappointed. What drives activists and negotiators from John Kerry to Greenpeace boss? Conversations with people who don’t want to give up.
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Michael Bauchmüller, Glasgow
John Kerry spreads his arms, perplexed. For a moment he looks sad. “Of course, I also count myself among the frustrated,” he says. “I’m as frustrated as many who have been with us for a long time.” For more than a quarter of a century, the world has been trying to fight climate change with increasingly gigantic climate conferences. Kerry was with most of them, sometimes as a senator, sometimes as foreign minister, and now as US President Joe Biden’s special envoy for the climate. He was already in Rio 1992 when it all began. In Kyoto 1997, when the industrialized countries committed themselves to fixed climate targets for the first time. In Copenhagen 2009, where the attempt to extend it to the whole world failed with a crash. “In Rio we thought we were finally on track,” says Kerry. “And in Kyoto too.” Will the U-turn work this time? With the Paris Agreement and now 26 conferences?