Mounting financial backing for climate change efforts is what Special Presidential Envoy on Climate John Kerry takes as the sign that U.S. leadership could never roll back climate policy again.

“My sense is that the amounts of money that are going to be invested in this transition will make it nearly impossible for anybody, ill advised enough or inclined, for whatever reason, to go against science and the efforts of every other country in the world,” Kerry said at the American Clean Power Association’s CLEANPOWER 2021 virtual summit on Tuesday.

The benefits of the transition, he added, will ensure that the U.S. will not “go backwards” on its commitments under the Paris Agreement in the future as it did under the Trump administration.

Trillions of dollars, he said, are going to be allocated to the climate challenge, and mandates for investment disclosures will have “a profound impact on people’s judgment about where capital ought to go.”

Net-zero financial alliances are happening at every level, he said.

In April, six U.S. banks committed to spending $4 trillion on climate-related efforts over the next decade and 14 asset managers handling $5 trillion in assets joined the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative. In addition, Kerry helped launch the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, which will coordinate the climate efforts of financial institutions.

“The key now is going to be to harmonize globally a lot of the standards by which we’re measuring investments,” he said.

Global Stage

The 26th U.N. Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow in November will be an opportunity for the U.S. to lead on climate, Kerry said. The U.S. wants to work with the other biggest GHG-emitting countries to develop a plan that goes beyond the 2015 Paris Agreement.

“The plan this time, unlike Paris, where everybody kind of did what they were willing to do, this is one where we now have to respond to the science and do what we need to do,” he said. The hope, he added, is to realize a significant reduction in emissions by 2030 and then move to a net-zero target for 2030 to 2050.

“Right now, we have 55% of global GDP … committed to keeping the Earth’s temperature at 1.5 degrees,” he said. “That’s an enormous step forward.”

The G7, he said, recently agreed to stop funding coal development internationally to meet the 1.5-degree target of the Paris Agreement. And the International Energy Agency just released a report that Kerry said calls for putting the deployment of existing renewable technologies and development of new solutions “on super steroids.”

All these efforts are “absolutely doable,” he said, but the test will be “whether we have the willpower to do it right.”