Nine months away from a U.N. summit in Paris, Secretary of State John Kerry on Thursday delivered a forceful call to confront and curb global warming.

Climate change ranks alongside terrorism, disease epidemics and poverty as a challenge that respects no borders and threatens the future of nations and the planet, Kerry declared in a speech at the Atlantic Council.

“No single country, not even the United States, can solve this problem or foot this bill alone,” Kerry said. “When I say ‘global solution,’ I mean it – anything less won’t work.”

The most critical component of any effective response to climate change, he added, is an “energy policy” that replaces the fossil fuels that power so many homes, cities and vehicles with solar, wind and other sources of clean energy.

“The solution is not a mystery; it’s staring us in the face,” Kerry said. “Energy policy: That’s the solution to climate change. And with the right choices at the right speed, you can actually prevent the worst effects of climate change from crippling us forever.”



President Barack Obama has made addressing climate change and reducing greenhouse gas emissions a priority of his second term. Faced with partisan intransigence in Congress, he has tasked the Energy Department, Environmental Protection Agency and Interior Department with backing clean energy initiatives, reducing emissions from cars, trucks and power plants, and preparing infrastructure for extreme storms that are expected to be made more frequent by climate change.

Through the State Department and his own personal diplomacy, Obama also has won climate accords with China and India, critical achievements ahead of the December U.N. summit, where negotiators from nearly 200 nations will aim to hammer out an international agreement to cut carbon emissions.

“This is by far the most ambitious set of climate actions that the United States of America has ever undertaken,” Kerry said.



Opponents in Congress and the fossil fuel industry have vociferously opposed the president’s climate actions, alleging they will raise rates on consumers and hurt the reliability of the nation’s energy grid. Some, such as Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., have questioned whether human activity has caused climate change.

Kerry, employing a veritable ecosystem of metaphors, dismissed such arguments on Thursday.

“The science is and has long been crystal clear,” he said. “Gambling with the future of Earth itself when we know full well what the outcome will be is just reckless. It is just plain immoral.”