John Kerry, President Biden’s climate envoy, appeared on the BBC in May 2021 to assure his western audience in high-income countries that they could relax: that not much needs to change. We “don’t have to give up a quality of life,” he said, “to achieve some of the things that we know we have to achieve. That’s the brilliance of some of the things that we know how to do.”

He went further. We can relax, Kerry effectively argued, because he had been “told by scientists that 50% of the reductions we have to make to get to net zero are going to come from technologies that we don’t yet have. That’s ...

 

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