Kerry, President Joe Biden's envoy to the Glasgow talks, is steaming from side conversations with US rivals China and Russia as they scrupulously seek climate agreement to press conferences praising progress. Kerry dives into project launches and rewards CEOs and bankers for their efforts to reduce emissions with high-profile facetime and accolades. The gangly envoy smiles for a photo with native women from Brazil, their feathered headdresses barely reaching his chin.
By the end of the first of two weeks of the UN climate summit, Kerry's voice grew hoarse from his mission to rally global climate efforts that threaten to hit a wall at home.
"The alternative is you don't do anything, you don't say anything" about climate, Kerry told reporters at the summit. “You have no promises, you have no obligations. And you sit there, waiting for the flood.”
He spoke of a climate battle that is becoming increasingly urgent as global warming from fossil fuel burning intensifies and becomes more fraught, while the United States' own wildly swinging seesaw policy jeopardizes Biden's climate efforts and threatens once again to the global momentum in this area.
With the summit underway, the US House on Friday finally passed a stalled infrastructure bill that includes some key measures to cut US emissions.
But Biden's lagging political support and Republican turmoil in the out-of-year election last week add to uncertainty that the US administration can deliver on some of Biden's biggest climate promises.
Kerry, President Barack Obama's secretary of state and former senator, returned after President Donald Trump to serve as Biden's climate envoy.
The job involved apologizing for the global disruption caused by Trump, who mocked the science behind climate change, when he withdrew the United States from the 2015 Paris climate accord that Kerry helped negotiate. Scientists say the soil lost during the Trump administration offers one last chance this decade to prevent the Earth from warming to more catastrophic levels.
At the climate summit, Kerry's height makes him an easy spot among the thousands of climate advocates, government officials and reporters in the prime location, which stretches for more than half a mile (almost a kilometer). It is a mix of permanent and temporary structures along the River Clyde in Glasgow that feels like an airport terminal flanked by a military forward-looking base.
Kerry seems patient and polite with the random advocates and reporters from around the world who approach him at the summit.
Before the summit, climate activists on a hunger strike at the gates of the White House filmed another Biden administration official waving impatiently on his phone as they approached him about the need for climate action.
Kerry, on the other hand, went out and spoke to the young climate strikers, telling them about his own environmental activism when he was young.
Kerry's first goal after returning from the Vietnam War was activism for the first Earth Day, in 1970, he says. His wife, Teresa Heinz, says they met on a later Earth Day, in 1990.
In 2015, his work in climate negotiations and the trust Xie appeared to place in Obama negotiators, including Kerry, helped a global climate deal in which more than 190 countries committed to take action to reduce climate emissions.
The irreversible damage wrought by global warming was even more apparent to everyone in November 2016, when Kerry made one of his last trips as Obama's Secretary of State and became the top US official to visit Antarctica.
The US presidential election had just handed victory to Trump, who had already promised to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord and would soon roll back US climate efforts in office.
Kerry squatted in boots over a frozen sea, faced a curious penguin and spoke to American scientists there.
The South Pole had the cleanest air in the world, but it too was heavily polluted with coal and petroleum waste, scientists told him. The West Antarctic ice sheet melted from below in the warming water, broke off and drifted out to sea.
It was "some of the most stunning wilderness," Kerry recalled to The Associated Press last month, and it was "mixed with the negative effects of humans."
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