During a sweltering rally in Las Vegas on Sunday, June 9, former President Donald Trump complained to his supporters about “sweating like a dog” in the triple-digit heat. Because climate change is breaking temperature records all over the world, one might have assumed that the aspiring leader’s next act would have been to express concern for the other people at his event.
Instead the Florida man told the attendees — ostensibly as a joke — that they needed to stay alive just long enough to cast their ballots for him.
“We need every voter. I don’t care about you, I just want your vote, I don’t care,” said Trump. Six people from the rally were later hospitalized for attending.
One person who definitely did not laugh at Trump’s joke is John Kerry. A former United States Senator and Secretary of State, as well as the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004, Kerry’s most recent job was as the first U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate. A longtime environmentalist, it made perfect sense for President Joe Biden to tap Kerry for this role, especially as Kerry and his wife Theresa Heinz Kerry co-authored a determinedly optimistic book warning about climate change, “This Moment on Earth.”
In the 2008 book, the Kerrys spoke with ordinary Americans from all walks of life about the differences they were making to protect the environment. More than a decade-and-a-half after its publication, Kerry told Salon that he still firmly believes in the hopeful vision laid out in “This Moment on Earth,” and does not share the view of anti-capitalists that more radical measures are necessary.
At the same time, Kerry expressed tremendous alarm about the prospect of Trump winning the 2024 election. Trump’s advisers have already announced their backing of a broad-reaching right-wing policy plan called Project 2025; if implemented, Project 2025 would gut environmental regulations and place science deniers in positions of power over climate policy. That is no doubt the foremost reason that Kerry spoke to Salon.
“This is really as big a fight as you get in an election,” Kerry said during our conversation. “And I hope young folks all around the country who have the energy and obviously the vision and the passion to put themselves on the line for this must make it one of the real top voting issues of this next election.”
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
During a recent rally in Las Vegas, Trump told audience members who are suffering from the climate change-exacerbated heat that “I don’t care about you, I just want your vote.” Now he says that was a joke. But do you believe it can be dismissed as just humor given his ongoing denial of climate change?
It is remarkable, narcissistic, even if it was a joke. It Is just all about him. It is never really about them. Never really about people, and certainly never really about a serious issue like the climate crisis, which he denies, which he is at the forefront of trying to dismiss.
He met recently at Mar-a-Lago for a dinner fundraiser with a bunch of oil and gas people. He just looked at them and said, “I’m your guy for drill, drill, drill” and “If you want the things you need, you gotta raise a billion dollars for me.” He literally made an open quid pro quo demand of people! He is one of those people spreading lies, not only about the election, but about climate, about wind turbines supposedly killing people and giving you cancer.
Here are these people sweltering in a 100-plus degrees — something like 102, 103 degrees — everywhere is hotter and more dangerous. He is living at that moment in the middle of a very significant manifestation of how bad things are getting … and he’s making a joke about it. It really tells you all you need to know about him.
There is so much, it’s hard to keep up with all the negatives, but I think that everybody knows because he’s the guy who pulled out of the Paris Agreement, which did great damage to the reputation of the United States and slowed down the transition to clean energy in America. Everyone knows that he doesn’t care about the issue, and he doesn’t care about people. He cares about himself. What we need to do is get more facts out there so that people can embrace, at the foundation, of why they need to be moving in a different direction.
The reality is that this is a very dangerous time on a global basis on a number of issues — i.e. the challenges to democracy itself in Ukraine, Russia, China. There are a host of really big challenges right now, but one of the biggest is that not enough attention is being paid the unbelievable damage being done in many parts of the world as a consequence of the increased warming. I just was looking today, when I was getting up, it was raining massively down in Florida, and they had more water in the span of a day or so then they normally get in something like a millennium.
Joe Biden promised he would rejoin the Paris Agreement within hours of being sworn in. He did that. He created this new position of special presidential envoy. He set America on a path to increase our own ambition here at home, and try to reduce our emissions, which we have done last year. The emissions of our country lowered by 4%, and the economy grew by 2.5%. So that puts the lie to Donald Trump’s distortion suggesting that it’s going to hurt our economy to make this transition. The fact is that the fastest growing jobs in America have to do with clean energy, and there is now more money going into clean energy, creating more clean energy jobs, than there are in fossil fuels. So everything that he seems to say about this, either evinces a massive misunderstanding or a massive distortion.
Either way, we can’t afford four years of that.
“There is always a robber baron capitalism that unfortunately haunts the economic structure.”
One of the stories from your book “This Moment on Earth” that I feel is really inspiring from that book is Rick Dove, the retired Marine and Vietnam veteran who became a Riverkeeper on the Hudson River. It speaks to how a lot of Americans, at least at that point, embraced environmental issues, even if they didn’t want to be identified with the term “environmentalist.” Looking back 16 years later, do you feel that humanity’s understanding of these issues is better, worse, or about the same as when you wrote that book?
I think without any question — without any question — humanity’s understanding of the issue has grown markedly, not the least reason for which is Mother Nature herself is sending daily messages like the kind I just described down in Florida. All over the world, people are suffering the consequences of the increased warming. You could look in India where it nearly reached 50 degrees Centigrade [122 degrees Fahrenheit]. I predicted, frankly, just about two and three months ago, I said, “Look, we’re going to have som
