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John Kerry praises Biden's action on climate change

Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry on Thursday touted President Biden’s climate pledge, saying, “We had to prove that we were serious.”

Video transcript

JOHN KERRY: Everywhere that I went in the world in the course of the last months, first question out of people's mouths was, what's your NDC going to be? What are you guys going to do? You've destroyed your credibility, you've left the Paris Agreement.

How can we trust you? What's going to happen in the next four years? To which there is a very, very powerful answer, which is no politician I think could change what is now happening globally in the marketplace. And that is part of the message of what's happened here today and in the last few days.

You've had-- yesterday, we announced the Net-Zero Bank Alliance, we announced to the Glasgow Financial Alliance for net-zero, and we have some 43 financial institutions across the world worth some-- I forget the exact sum-- $40 some trillion or something in terms of assets managed. And just yesterday, a number of banks announced-- six banks to be precise-- that they are allocating or setting or making a commitment that they will invest into climate-related efforts, initiatives, investments, $4.16 trillion over the next 10 years.

That's been a really missing element in all of this. So I'm really happy to be here today for a number of reasons. First of all, just parenthetically, five years ago today, I had my granddaughter on my knee in New York and signed the Paris Agreement. And that was a great moment for everybody in the world.

When everybody came together in New York, excitedly to set out on this venture. Regrettably, without any facts, without any science, without any rationale that would be considered reasonable, the former president decided to pull out. He's the only president in the entire world, the only chief of state in the entire world, who without any scientific evidence, decided to pull out of the Paris Agreement.

So when President Biden was elected, having made climate one of the most critical issues of his agenda, we had a big step to get up. We had to restore America's credibility. We had to prove that we were serious.

And I think today does that in many ways. And not in a chauvinist-- in a way that's sort of inappropriate to our relationship with other countries. But in a way that reinforces the fact that this is multilateral. That we need to bring all the countries of the world to the table, and we all need to raise ambition.