John Kerry calls Trump the 'biggest loser' on climate as US skips Cop31 talks

White House dismisses talks, saying ‘extremist climate policies’ destroy countries

Former US secretary of state John Kerry called Donald Trump the “biggest loser we’ve seen in a long time” for scrapping action on the climate crisis and ceding the clean energy race to China, speaking at the Cop31 climate summit in Antalya, Turkey.

Kerry, who served as climate envoy under President Joe Biden, criticized Trump for withdrawing the United States from the international climate process and axing measures that reduced planet-heating emissions. The Trump administration, unlike almost all other countries, sent no delegation to the annual UN talks, which started Monday in the resort city. A White House official confirmed that no one would attend, saying: “This summit rejects reality by failing to acknowledge that extremist climate policies are destroying countries around the world.”

Trump has previously called climate science a “hoax” and called for countries to drill for more oil and gas. On Monday, discussing potential new legislation that would make it easier to build energy projects, he said: “I will not approve wind turbines because wind turbines are a major loser.” Trump, who has long voiced hostility toward wind farms, again expressed his opposition to clean energy in the remarks.

Asked about the president’s comments by the Guardian, Kerry said: “[The] first thing they should do is hold up a really big mirror so he can look at a loser, because he’s the biggest loser we’ve seen in a long time on all of these issues.”

“He’s missing the point,” Kerry said. “He’s missing the competitiveness with China. He’s missing the marketplace for goods that could be produced in the United States. We could be the supply chain for some of these.”

“He declared he wanted to beat China, be number one in X, Y, or Z, and he walked away from the battlefield,” Kerry said of Trump. “He totally took America out of that sector. So honestly, if you want to be number one, you don’t do it by literally blackballing an entire sector of the economy.”

Under Biden, the United States passed sweeping climate legislation that gave tax breaks for clean energy and electric vehicle manufacturing in a bid to compete with China, which has dominated clean technology. Republicans eliminated most of that support, and Trump instead imposed tariffs on various goods and poured public money into propping up struggling coal-fired power plants. Coal is the dirtiest of fossil fuels, causing much of the pollution that is dangerously overheating our planet.

Kerry, who ran as the Democratic candidate for president in 2004, has repeatedly urged the United States and the rest of the world to follow China’s lead on green energy. The rapid growth in renewables has helped prevent a significant amount of fossil fuel power from coming online, and global emissions edged down slightly last year. Far larger and deeper cuts are still needed to avoid catastrophic climate change. UN secretary general António Guterres told the countries gathered at Cop31 it was “long past time” to phase out fossil fuel use.

Advocates have reacted angrily to years of slow progress in talks to even discuss fossil fuels, the central cause of the climate crisis. Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who arrived in Antalya on Tuesday, said: “Cops have become greenwashed circuses. That is the reality.”

Kerry acknowledged the slow pace of progress and said politicians should talk differently about the climate crisis to engage the public. He said that while global heating was not the central issue in the recent US midterm elections, concerns about it overlapped with alarm over rising energy costs and drove voters to the Democrats. “I think we will have a number of candidates who will have this high on the agenda,” Kerry said of the victorious Democratic candidates. “And all of the analysis that I’ve seen, I mean real analysis, has said this was one of the issues that counted.”