NEWPORT, R.I. — Former Secretary of State John Kerry answered questions about the country’s environmental progress and obstacles from under a large white tent on Salve Regina University’s lawn Thursday evening.  

The university had to move the keynote speech from inside to accommodate the large number of attendees who registered for the talk.

Kerry spoke as a part of The Forum at Newport, co-hosted by Salve Regina and the Naval War College, which included talks centered around national security and climate change from Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., and Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I.

Kerry, 80, said he originally came to Newport as a young officer candidate to train at the Naval War College, just down the road from Salve Regina. He recalled getting his hair shorn off about 15 minutes after his arrival.

“Some people have heads that are meant to be seen bald,” he said. “I do not.”

The retired statesman spoke about his military stories, exploits of diplomacy, and where he thinks the country and world must go to achieve their climate goals.

Here are three takeaways from his talk.

PARTISANSHIP

Kerry spoke of the destructive nature of today’s partisan politics and how it has worked against climate action.

Giving the example of efforts to institute cap-and-trade policies for carbon emissions, Kerry said the policy, which had initially been bipartisan, floundered because it was politicized.

He said it got even uglier when groups against the policy started using personal attacks against members of Congress in more conservative districts.

“On a Saturday morning, I had a call from Lindsey Graham, grown man, United States senator, powerful, and he was crying, in tears, ripped apart by what they were doing to him,” recalled Kerry, adding that Graham told him he was going to have to pull his support for the legislation, which led to its demise.

“We don’t look for truth, we don’t look for bipartisanship, we don’t look for the solution,” Kerry said about the state of affairs today. “We look for the politics. We look for the way to savage somebody and win the political edge.”

“America writ large — liberal, conservative, Republican, Democrat — is hurt by that,” he added.

PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS

Although Kerry noted that the United State is making some strides to improve renewable energy capacity and replace fossil fuels, the process isn’t moving fast enough.

“Two things that are missing are speed and scale,” said Kerry, citing work by John Doerr, who created Stanford University’s School of Sustainability. “That’s what has to happen.”

And that’s not something the government always does well, he noted.

“No government in the world has enough money to solve [the climate crisis]. What the government can do, or should be doing, is galvanizing action, bringing people together around policy,” he said.

The Inflation Reduction Act did that, he said, by giving private companies incentives to start investing in green energy.

Kerry said he would like to see more of this type of government action to spur private development, like a “Manhattan-type Project,” for renewable energy, referring to the research and development program during World War II that produced nuclear weapons.

Nuclear, he said, will have to be a part of that picture as well. He mentioned a new company created by Bill Gates aiming to make smaller and safer reactors and research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Kerry used the Navy’s use of nuclear submarines as an example of how nuclear can be safe.

“We got sailors living on board ships driven by nuclear power, and their bunks are not that far away from, you know, the reactors,” he said. “We have never had an accident.”

DIPLOMACY

“I think often what gets in the way, in our own way, in trying to forge relationships and do things that make sense, is the lowest common denominator of American politics,” Kerry said.

The prevailing feeling, especially in 2020, he said, was politicians “banging away on China.”

But at the national climate accords Kerry has negotiated on and off since the Obama administration, he said, China would be a big part of the puzzle to mitigate global climate change and that strategy would work.

“I am not Pollyannaish about China,” he noted, saying that issues of human rights violations against the Uighur people, Taiwanese security, and fair-trade practices are all issues he is concerned about.

Ultimately, at the most recent COP — which stands for “conference of parties” and refers to the annual U.N. international climate conference — China agreed to submit its national determined contributions, which is a carbon emissions reduction plan.

“The only place we got anything consequential done in the last four years with China was on climate,” he said. “You do not, in my judgment, advance your interests of working these things through in a realistic way by just publicly bashing people and choosing to see who can out-rhetoric whom.”