John Kerry, the United States’ special climate envoy and former secretary of state and presidential contender, plans to leave the Biden administration later this winter and switch to helping Joe Biden campaign to be re-elected to the White House, Kerry’s office said.
Kerry informed his staff earlier on Saturday after speaking with the US president this week, a spokesperson for Kerry told Reuters.
Politics news outlet Axios first reported the news about Kerry, 80, on Saturday.
Kerry was instrumental is helping to broker the 2015 Paris climate agreement, as well as the UAE consensus that calls for the transition away from fossil fuels reached in December at Cop28 in Dubai.
He believes that a second term in the White House for Biden would be the “single biggest” difference for progress in the climate crisis, Axios reported, initially citing a source close to the administration.
Kerry and Biden talked in the Oval Office earlier this week, after Kerry had attended the Cop28 global climate summit in Dubai late last year, and the climate envoy wants to promote Biden’s climate action with a major role on the campaign trail for the 2024 election, the outlet further reported.
Kerry was named as a special envoy on the climate crisis soon after Biden won the 2020 presidential election, beating Donald Trump, and began forming his team during the transition period that November.
At the time, the Biden transition team said Kerry would “fight climate change full time” in the role, which for the first time would include a seat on the national security council, in an elevation of the importance of tackling the climate crisis and global heating.
As President Barack Obama’s secretary of state, succeeding Hillary Clinton in the role, Kerry played a prominent role in the international effort to craft the Paris climate agreement, which committed countries to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in order to avoid disastrous storms, heatwaves, flooding and other looming climate threats.
After leaving government in January 2017 as the Obama administration was replaced by the Trump administration, Kerry became sharply critical of President Trump’s dismantling of climate policies and the decision to remove the US from the Paris agreement. Biden re-entered the accord upon taking office in 2021.
Kerry ran for president in the 2004 election and won the Democratic nomination but was beaten by George W Bush that November, with the Republican president winning a second term.
His election campaign was badly damaged by a pro-Bush group that smeared Kerry’s military track record as a decorated Vietnam veteran who became an anti-war campaigner.
The group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, emerged in August 2004 as Kerry, then a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, was doing well in the polls against Bush, who had only a domestic spell in the Texas air national guard in comparison. The group set about trying to destroy Kerry’s reputation.
A Republican strategist, Chris LaCivita, who orchestrated the so-called “swift-boating” of Kerry, is now a senior aide to the Trump re-election campaign.
Reuters contributed reporting
