Tag Archives: kerry

John Kerry Plans to Give a Speech

by HarrisBenefield Posted on December 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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In the aftermath of the UN vote condemning Israeli settlements on the West Bank, John Kerry plans to give a speech today:

In a last-chance effort to shape the outlines of a Middle East peace deal, Secretary of State John Kerry is to outline in a speech on Wednesday the Obama administration’s vision of a final Israeli-Palestinian accord based on bitter lessons learned from an effort that collapsed in 2014.

….Mr. Kerry, the official said, has long wanted to give a speech outlining an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal but was held back by White House officials, who saw it as unnecessary pressure on Israel that would anger Mr. Netanyahu. But that objection was lifted last week as Mr. Obama and Mr. Kerry agreed the time had come to abstain on the United Nations resolution.

I don’t really understand the motivation at work here. This has nothing to do with my skepticism about the peace process in general, but with the pointlessness of the speech itself. It’s sort of like writing a piece of fanfic, where you get to demonstrate to your circle of friends how cleverly you’d tie up all the questions and loose ends in the original work. Except it’s not even fanfic: it’s more like an outline for a piece of fanfic, and without the opportunity to even display any cleverness.

Both Israel and the Palestinians are keenly aware of every issue separating them. Their inability to make a deal has nothing to do with the lack of a clever-enough plan. They just don’t agree with each other and they don’t trust each other. Actual negotiations, in which Kerry applied pressure to compromise and helped to build trust, were perfectly defensible even if I personally think there was never any chance of success. But a speech outlining a plan? Why bother?

I dunno. With everything in tatters and only three weeks left in the Obama administration, maybe Kerry feels like he can rip off the diplo-mask and give a truly bracing speech of the kind that no American has ever dared to give. I suppose that could have a modest effect. But what are the odds he has that in mind?

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John Kerry Plans to Give a Speech

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Breaking: World Leaders Just Agreed to a Landmark Deal to Fight Global Warming

by Bart70735787193 Posted on December 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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There was relief and celebration in Paris Saturday evening, as officials from more than 190 countries swept aside monumental differences and agreed to an unprecedented global deal to tackle climate change.

The historic accord, known as the Paris Agreement, includes emissions-slashing commitments from individual countries and promises to help poorer nations adapt to the damaging effects of a warming world. Negotiators also agreed on measures to revise, strengthen, and scrutinize countries’ contributions going forward.

“This is a tremendous victory for all our citizens,” said Secretary of State John Kerry during the final session of the summit. “It’s a victory for all of the planet and for future generations.”

However, the deal leaves some key decisions to the future, and it is widely recognized as not representing an ultimate solution to climate change. Instead, it sets out the rules of the road for the next 10 to 15 years and establishes an unprecedented international legal basis for addressing climate issues. Within the agreement, nearly every country on Earth laid out its own plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to climate change impacts. Although those individual plans are not legally binding, the core agreement itself is.

The deal sets a long-term goal of keeping the increase in the global temperature to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels and calls on countries to “pursue efforts” to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees C. It adds that “parties aim to reach a global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible.”

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who has served as chair of the two-week summit, said the deal is the most ambitious step ever taken by the international community to confront climate change.

In announcing the deal, President Barack Obama clinched a major foreign policy success years in the making and secured long-term action on climate change as a core part of his legacy, despite extraordinary opposition at home from the Republican majority in Congress. During the second week of the talks in Paris, Kerry was a driving force, delivering several high-profile speeches in which he sought to cast the United States as a leader on climate action. For Kerry, who has been a prominent voice in climate summits for two decades, it was essential to craft a deal to which the United States could agree and not to return home empty-handed.

The deal signals that world leaders are now committed to responding to the dire scientific warnings about the impacts of warming. Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels and other human activities are threatening to usher in an era of rising sea levels, sinking islands, scorching heat waves, devastating droughts, mass human migration, and destruction of ecosystems.

Among the deal’s biggest successes is a commitment to produce a global review of climate progress by 2018 and to bring countries back to the negotiating table by 2020 to present climate targets that “will represent a progression beyond the Party’s then-current” target. In other words, countries are committed to ramping up their ambition in the short term. This was an essential item for many people here, since the current raft of targets only keeps global warming to 2.7 degrees C, not 1.5 degrees. The deal also promises to hold every country accountable to the same standard of transparency in measuring and reporting their greenhouse gas emissions; this was a provision that the United States had pushed hard for in order to ensure that other big polluters such as China and India abide by their promises.

“Countries have united around a historic agreement that marks a turning point in the climate crisis,” said Jennifer Morgan, global director of the climate program at the World Resources Institute. “This is a transformational long-term goal that should really send clear signals into the markets” about the imminent decline of fossil fuel consumption.

The deal is expected to be a boon for the clean energy industry, as developing and developed countries alike increase their investments in wind, solar, and other renewable energy sources. Early in the talks, a high-profile group of billionaire investors, including Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, promised to pour money into clean energy research, and a critical component of the agreement is a commitment for developed countries to transfer clean technologies to developing countries.

“If we needed an economic signal from this agreement, I think this is rather remarkable,” said Michael Jacobs, a senior advisor at New Climate Economy.

Still, parts of the deal left some environmental groups unsatisfied, particularly with respect to financing for clean energy technology and climate change adaptation. The deal requires all developed countries to “provide financial assistance to assist developing country Parties with respect to both mitigation and adaptation.” Although the deal sets a floor of $100 billion for that assistance and calls for that number to be raised by 2025, it doesn’t specify a new higher target and does not commit any country, including the United States, to any particular share of that. The deal also specifies that nothing in it can be construed as holding countries with the biggest historical contribution to climate change—most importantly the United States—legally or financially liable for climate-change-related damages in vulnerable countries. And it provides no specific timeline for peaking and reducing global greenhouse gas emissions; according to some scientists, that will need to happen within the next few decades for the 1.5 degrees C target to be achievable.

“There’s not enough in this deal for the nations and people on the frontlines of climate change,” said Kumi Naidoo, international executive director of Greenpeace, in a statement. “It contains an inherent, ingrained injustice. The nations which caused this problem have promised too little help to the people who are already losing their lives and livelihoods.”

The task of delegates at Le Bourget, a converted airport north of Paris, over the past two weeks was substantial. After all, more than two decades of UN-led climate talks had failed to produce a global deal to limit greenhouse gases. The Copenhagen talks in 2009 collapsed because officials couldn’t agree on how to level the playing field between rich and poor countries, sending negotiations into a morass of recriminations. Before that, the Kyoto protocol in 1997 also failed—the United States and China didn’t ratify it, and it only covered about 14 percent of global carbon emissions. This year’s negotiations, the 21st in the series of UN climate talks, had to be different.

One of the major reasons negotiators were able to reach a deal was that much of the work had been done in advance. By the time Paris rolled around, more than 150 countries had promised to change the way they use energy, detailing those changes in the form of individual commitments. Known as INDCs, these pledges formed the basis of Saturday’s deal. Of course, the INDCs won’t be legally binding, and even if most countries do manage to live up to their promises, they aren’t yet ambitious enough to prevent dangerous levels of warming.

The latest estimate is that the INDCs will limit global warming to about 2.7 degrees C above pre-industrial levels. That’s above the limit of 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) that scientists say is necessary to avert the worst impacts of global warming—and far above the 1.5 degrees C target that negotiators in Paris agreed to aim for. But it’s also about 1 degree C less warming than would happen if the world continued on its present course.

The Paris summit began as the largest meeting of government leaders in history (outside the UN building in New York) just two weeks after ISIS-affiliated terrorists killed 130 people across the city. While French officials immediately promised the talks would continue, they soon banned long-planned, massive climate protests, citing security concerns. That decision set the stage for several skirmishes between police and protesters, who remained committed to disrupting the talks in order to highlight issues such as sponsorship from big oil companies and the plight of poorer countries. At one protest, an estimated 10,000 people formed a human chain in the Place de la République, the site of a spontaneous memorial to the victims of the Paris attacks. There were scores of arrests.

But the climate talks themselves went ahead as planned. Some 40,000 heads of state, diplomats, scientists, activists, policy experts, and journalists descended on the French capital for the event. Perhaps the biggest factor driving the negotiators’ unprecedented optimism was the fact that the two biggest greenhouse gas emitters, and the world’s two biggest economies—the United States and China—had made a public show of working together to get an agreement. A landmark climate deal between the two countries in November 2014 built critical momentum. China later promised to create a national cap-and-trade program to augment a suite of emissions control policies. The Obama administration, meanwhile, pushed through its Clean Power Plan regulations, despite aggressive resistance from Republicans. Still, as the talks neared their conclusion on Friday, tensions were rising between the so-called “High Ambition Coalition”—a negotiating bloc including the United States, the European Union, and dozens of developing countries—and China and India.

Nevertheless, a rare alliance between world leaders ultimately prevailed: Pope Francis, for one, campaigned tirelessly for a climate deal ahead of the talks, decrying the “unprecedented destruction of the ecosystem.”

All of this cleared the way for large groups of developed and developing countries to cooperate at the talks. Bigger countries appeared ready to work with the 43-country-strong negotiating bloc of highly vulnerable developing nations. Recent changes of leadership in Canada and Australia, notable adversaries of climate action in recent years, switched these mid-sized players into fans of a deal before the talks. Even Russia’s Vladimir Putin seemed to have an eleventh-hour change of heart—or, at least, of rhetoric—and called for action.

Read the final draft of the agreement below.

More details to follow.

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Breaking: World Leaders Just Agreed to a Landmark Deal to Fight Global Warming

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, Hagen, LAI, Landmark, LG, Mop, ONA, PUR, Radius, solar, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Breaking: World Leaders Just Agreed to a Landmark Deal to Fight Global Warming

Why Does Washington Still Romanticize Kissinger, Scowcroft, and Brzezinksi?

by Jeff Peterson Posted on January 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

En route back to Washington at the tail end of his most recent overseas trip, John Kerry, America’s peripatetic secretary of state, stopped off in France “to share a hug with all of Paris.” Whether Paris reciprocated the secretary’s embrace went unrecorded.

Despite the requisite reference to General Pershing (“Lafayette, we are here!”) and flying James Taylor in from the 1960s to assure Parisians that “You’ve Got a Friend,” in the annals of American diplomacy Kerry’s hug will likely rank with President Eisenhower’s award of the Legion of Merit to Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza for “exceptionally meritorious conduct” and Jimmy Carter’s acknowledgment of the “admiration and love” said to define the relationship between the Iranian people and their Shah. In short, it was a moment best forgotten.

Alas, this vapid, profoundly silly event is all too emblematic of statecraft in the Obama era. Seldom have well-credentialed and well-meaning people worked so hard to produce so little of substance.

Not one of the signature foreign policy initiatives conceived in Obama’s first term has borne fruit. When it came to making a fresh start with the Islamic world, responsibly ending the “dumb” war in Iraq (while winning the “necessary” one in Afghanistan), “resetting” US-Russian relations, and “pivoting” toward Asia, mark your scorecard 0 for 4.

There’s no doubt that when Kerry arrived at the State Department he brought with him some much-needed energy. That he is giving it his all—the department’s website reports that the secretary has already clocked over 682,000 miles of travel—is doubtless true as well. The problem is the absence of results. Remember when his signature initiative was going to be an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal? Sadly, that quixotic plan, too, has come to naught.

Yes, Team Obama “got” bin Laden. And, yes, it deserves credit for abandoning a self-evidently counterproductive 50-plus-year-old policy toward Cuba and for signing a promising agreement with China on climate change. That said, the administration’s overall record of accomplishment is beyond thin, starting with that first-day-in-the-Oval-Office symbol that things were truly going to be different: Obama’s order to close Guantanamo. That, of course, remains a work in progress (despite regular reassurances of light glimmering at the end of what has become a very long tunnel).

In fact, taking the president’s record as a whole, noting that on his watch occasional US drone strikes have become routine, the Nobel Committee might want to consider revoking its Peace Prize.

Nor should we expect much in the time that Obama has remaining. Perhaps there is a deal with Iran waiting in the wings (along with the depth charge of ever-fiercer congressionally mandated sanctions), but signs of intellectual exhaustion are distinctly in evidence.

“Where there is no vision,” the Hebrew Bible tells us, “the people perish.” There’s no use pretending: if there’s one thing the Obama administration most definitely has not got and has never had, it’s a foreign policy vision.

In Search of Truly Wise (White) Men—Only Those 84 or Older Need Apply

All of this evokes a sense of unease, even consternation bordering on panic, in circles where members of the foreign policy elite congregate. Absent visionary leadership in Washington, they have persuaded themselves, we’re all going down. So the world’s sole superpower and self-anointed global leader needs to get game—and fast.

Leslie Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, recently weighed in with a proposal for fixing the problem: clean house. Obama has surrounded himself with fumbling incompetents, Gelb charges. Get rid of them and bring in the visionaries.

Writing at the Daily Beast, Gelb urges the president to fire his entire national security team and replace them with “strong and strategic people of proven foreign policy experience.” Translation: the sort of people who sip sherry and nibble on brie in the august precincts of the Council of Foreign Relations. In addition to offering his own slate of nominees, including several veterans of the storied George W. Bush administration, Gelb suggests that Obama consult regularly with Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and James Baker. These distinguished war-horses range in age from 84 to 91. By implication, only white males born prior to World War II are eligible for induction into the ranks of the Truly Wise Men.

Anyway, Gelb emphasizes, Obama needs to get on with it. With the planet awash in challenges that “imperil our very survival,” there is simply no time to waste.

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Why Does Washington Still Romanticize Kissinger, Scowcroft, and Brzezinksi?

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The U.S. and India keep pushing toward a climate deal

by WillardSomerset Posted on January 12, 2015

The U.S. and India keep pushing toward a climate deal

By on 12 Jan 2015 12:40 pmcommentsShare

Preparations are well underway for President Obama’s visit to India later this month. New Delhi is emptying the cattle from its streets. The U.S. Secret Service is installing anti-aircraft guns on the city’s rooftops. And U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry just made a visit himself to lay the groundwork for some big announcements — most notably on climate change.

Officials in the U.S. delegation traveling with Kerry told the Associated Press that there could soon be news about a solar energy deal, a joint effort to bring electricity to the country’s rural areas, and, possibly, a carbon-reduction pact, hinted about for months, that Obama and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi would both sign.

The possibility of a climate deal between the U.S. and India, the world’s third largest annual emitter of greenhouse gases, is inviting comparisons to the big U.S.-China announcement late last year. It’s unlikely, however, that we can expect anything so far-reaching; India has repeatedly reminded the world that its people are very poor, and argued that it therefore deserves some leeway on the whole emission-reduction thing. The country points out that even as its emissions continue to grow (see graph on the left below), its per-capita emissions are well below the world average (see graph on the right).

(Click to embiggen.)

Still, in the run-up to Obama’s visit, Kerry, who brokered the China-U.S. deal, has been putting climate change front and center. At a speech yesterday in Gujarat, Modi’s home state — at which both U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and World Bank President Jim Yong Kim were present — Kerry used dire terms to call for action in the face of an impending crisis.

“There is one enormous cloud hanging over all of us which requires responsibility from leaders,” Kerry said. “Global climate change is already violently affecting communities not just across India but around the world. It is disrupting commerce, development, and economic growth. It’s costing farmers crops. It’s costing insurance companies unbelievable payouts. It’s raising the cost of doing business, and believe me, if it continues down the current trend-line, we will see climate refugees fighting each other for water and seeking food and new opportunity.”

As India’s carbon emissions continue to grow, Modi has been making a number of decisions on the environment that combine a gung-ho attitude toward technology and innovation with a deregulatory approach to business. It makes for an interesting environmental agenda in which polluters anticipate facing less scrutiny while the country simultaneously pushes renewable energy and encourages building sustainability.

Modi has been particularly keen on seeking foreign investment for solar power, which, at the moment, still costs up to 50 percent more than India’s No. 1 source of power, coal. At the same investment summit where Kerry spoke on Sunday, U.S.-based SunEdison and the Indian energy conglomerate Adani Enterprises announced a $4 billion investment in a joint project to produce low-cost solar panels. The proposed factory would become one of India’s largest manufacturers of solar panels, with plans to make them so cheaply that they “can compete head to head, unsubsidized and without incentives, with fossil fuels,” according Ahmad Chatila, president and CEO of SunEdison. (Adani, apparently hedging its bets, also announced an agreement to explore liquified natural gas opportunities with an Australian energy company.)

The announcement of any emission-reduction agreement between the U.S. and India will come, if it comes, in two weeks, when Obama comes to New Delhi for the city’s Republic Day celebration. Reuters notes that there’s a possibility that the leaders will be wreathed in air pollution during a Jan. 26 parade, at which Obama will be guest of honor. New Delhi’s smog is dense, and lately it’s been bad enough, according to a U.S. EPA scale, to cause “significant aggravation of heart or lung disease and premature mortality in persons with cardiopulmonary disease and the elderly” and a “significant increase in respiratory effects in the general population.” At the 2010 Republic Day celebration, the pollution was so thick that the crowds couldn’t see that year’s guest of honor, the president of South Korea.

The pollution would tinge any environmental announcement between the two leaders with a bit of irony. Even if India, with its low per-capita emissions, wants to leave the fight against climate change up to countries that bear more historical responsibility for the problem, there is a strong interest in improving air quality for the tens of millions of Indians living in its major cities. That, too, could prompt the country to come up with a plan to shift away from or limit the use of dirty fuels.

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The U.S. and India keep pushing toward a climate deal

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, global climate change, LAI, LG, ONA, Prepara, solar, solar panels, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The U.S. and India keep pushing toward a climate deal

Kerry implores India to tackle climate change, ticks off Indian enviros

by kx93z6g Posted on June 24, 2013

Kerry implores India to tackle climate change, ticks off Indian enviros

By John Upton

U.S. Embassy New Delhi

IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri, an Indian, welcomes John Kerry. That’s America’s ambassador to India, Nancy Powell, in the background.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in India over the weekend and gave a speech urging the fast-developing country to work closely with the U.S. and other countries on solutions to climate change.

Kerry is leading a delegation to Delhi for U.S.-India talks focused on trade and energy; Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz is part of the visiting group. The stop in Delhi is one leg of a trip Kerry is making throughout the region.

The Americans’ arrival in Delhi coincided with deadly floods in northern India that some Indian officials have linked to global warming. But though climate change poses urgent dangers in India, Kerry’s speech was not received warmly by all of the nation’s environmentalists. Some felt they were being lectured to by the secretary of state, a representative of a nation that is second only to China in total greenhouse gas emissions.

Kerry has long warned of the dangers of climate change, and it’s been one of his favorite topics to discuss abroad since he was sworn in as Obama’s top diplomat. “Everywhere I travel as secretary of state — in every meeting, here at home and across the more than 100,000 miles I’ve traveled since I raised my hand and took the oath to serve in this office — I raise the concern of climate change,” he wrote just last week in an opinion piece in Grist.

Kerry’s speech in India was part of a broader push by the Obama administration on climate change. The U.S. recently struck a deal with China to cooperate on reducing heat-trapping HFC emissions, and the president is preparing to make a big climate announcement on Tuesday.

The New York Times reports on Kerry’s speech:

“I do understand and fully sympathize with the notion that India’s paramount commitment to development and eradicating poverty [by increasing electricity supplies] is essential,” Mr. Kerry said in a speech at the start of a two-day visit. “But we have to recognize that a collective failure to meet our collective climate challenge would inhibit all countries’ dreams of growth and development.”

In an effort to prod the Indians to act, Mr. Kerry warned that climate change could cause India to endure excessive heat waves, prolonged droughts, intense flooding and shortages of food and water.

“The worst consequences of the climate crisis will confront people who are the least able to be able to cope with them,” he said. …

Mr. Kerry also pleaded with India to commit to working constructively on a global treaty to be negotiated under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

From Reuters:

Emerging economies like India have resisted pressure in global climate talks to commit to targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, in a dispute with rich nations over whose industries should bear the brunt of the cuts.

The 1.2 billion people who live in India use far less electricity than do Americans, but the nation’s growing economy and its dependance upon coal pose major global warming threats.

Chandra Bhushan, a senior official at the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment, was unimpressed by Kerry’s speech, as he explained in an opinion piece in Down to Earth, a leading Indian environmental magazine published by his nonprofit:

I have no problems with [Kerry’s] pitch for countries coming together to develop renewable energy. But I have issues with the fact that nowhere in his speech did he mention what the US is doing on renewable energy or what is the renewable energy target that the US has set for itself for, say 2020. The fact is that today close to 20 per cent of India’s electricity supply is from renewable sources (including hydropower). India has set itself a target for renewable energy; the US has not.

The US today is going the fossil fuel route. It is moving to shale gas big time. Kerry should know that this shale gas mania would destroy the renewable future of the world that he so fervently preached yesterday.

I found his speech hypocritical. He talked about how India should reduce its emissions from residential sector but gave the massive energy consumption in residential and commercial sectors in the US a convenient miss. The US is the largest consumer of HFCs in the world, but Kerry did not throw light on what the US is doing to phase out the highly potent greenhouse gas, and how quickly. While I agree that India should also phase out HFCs, … it should not be through a deal that only benefits American multinational companies.

Though Kerry’s comments might not have pleased everybody, they were delivered in a country that is being hit especially hard by global warming — and that needs to do more to tackle and adapt to it.

Climate change is causing India’s once-predictable monsoon to become erratic. It is pushing up temperatures in a region already known for its scorching summers. And it is melting glaciers that are relied upon by hundreds of millions of people for year-round water supplies.

Last year, the subcontinent’s annual summer monsoon arrived months late, parching farms and causing widespread blackouts by reducing hydroelectric supplies.

This year, the monsoon appears to have arrived early, and when it reached the country’s north, it collided with low-pressure troughs that had pushed unusually far south. That collision of weather systems triggered remarkable deluges. Resultant floods have killed at least 5,000 people in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand. They also inundated Delhi’s international airport and pushed levels in the Yamuna River in the capital to their highest points since 1978.

Some Indian officials are saying climate change could be to blame for the flooding. There’s a paucity of scientific research into the possible effects of climate change on the nation, but some studies are underway. “We’re trying to assess the impacts of climate change on the regional climate and on the monsoons,” Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology monsoon researcher Raghavan Krishnan told Grist. “We’re trying to look at extreme precipitation.”

While the research continues, it may be a good idea for India to take stock of the global warming impacts that are already understood and at least follow America’s lead by starting to break its nasty coal addiction.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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TransCanada is getting everyone it knows to hustle Obama on Keystone

by NielPostma231 Posted on February 7, 2013

TransCanada is getting everyone it knows to hustle Obama on Keystone

By Philip Bump

TransCanada and its allies have reached the “begging” stage of their lobbying for the Keystone XL pipeline. (The preceding stage was “obfuscation”; the final stage is “giving up and moving to space.”)

This morning, the CEO of the company met with a key State Department official. From The Hill:

CEO Russ Girling is scheduled to meet in the afternoon with Kerri-Ann Jones, who is the department’s assistant secretary for oceans and international environmental and scientific affairs. …

Secretary of State John Kerry, at his recent Senate confirmation hearing, kept his cards close to the vest when asked about his views on the pipeline.

Girling told Bloomberg Wednesday that he expects the project will be approved “very soon” and that he suspects “we’re looking at anything from a few weeks to a couple of months.”

The mention of Kerry there is important. It’s a reminder that Jones isn’t the decision-maker. And that Kerry’s not either. Ultimately, approval comes down to the president, who I suspect won’t spend a lot of time reviewing Jones’ notes from this meeting. And what’s Girling going to say in this confab anyway? “Hey, come on. Pleeeeeease? Pleeeeeeeeeeeeease?” It’s not a great argument, but at this point it’s probably the best he’s got.

qodio

The president talks pipes.

Meanwhile, some of Girling’s friends are blustering about the pipeline over on Capitol Hill. Again from The Hill, which is going wall-to-wall on the issue:

All 25 Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee urged approval of the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline in a Thursday letter to President Obama.

“Our economy can no longer be put on hold while the bureaucratic process you set in motion jeopardizes this critical project. You can guarantee Americans the jobs they deserve, and prevent our national security from being undermined, with a simple stroke of the pen. We urge you to do so now,” the lawmakers wrote.

Yes, Mr. President! Take our economy off hold! You know how every time you go to the grocery store or try to buy something online, you get that message that says, “I’m sorry, your transaction cannot be completed because the President has halted all economic activity”? That’s because of the pipeline.

What’s interesting about this situation — and what’s probably fun for the president — is that the tables have turned. This time, it’s Congress that’s ineffectually calling for something to happen while Obama holds all the cards.

Maybe that’s why we shouldn’t expect a decision before June: Obama’s savoring it.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Kerry’s new gig weighing in on Keystone means giving up Keystone-related stocks

by Myrna Posted on January 23, 2013

Kerry’s new gig weighing in on Keystone means giving up Keystone-related stocks

By Philip Bump

Remember when Susan Rice, the likely nominee for secretary of state, had those investments in fossil fuel companies — including companies linked to Keystone XL? This was considered hugely problematic, given that the State Department is responsible for final approval of the pipeline. But Obama didn’t nominate Rice.

spirit of america

John Kerry points at a pile of stock.

Meet John Kerry, nominee for secretary of state, who has investments in fossil fuel companies — including companies linked to Keystone XL. For now. From The Boston Globe:

Within 90 days of becoming Secretary of State, Senator John F. Kerry and his wife have agreed to divest nearly 100 separate investments in the United States and abroad — ranging from oil companies to weapons makers and a Chinese food company — in an effort to avoid conflicts of interest, according to a copy of his so-called ethics agreement. …

The divestitures of Kerry and Teresa Heinz Kerry, the heir to the Heinz ketchup fortune, include Cenovus Energy Inc., the Canadian company that would benefit from the proposed Keystone XL pipeline; Waltham-based Raytheon Co.; Exxon Mobil Corp.; drug maker Pfizer; communications giant Qualcomm Inc. and AT&T; American Express; Microsoft; a number of international private equity firms; and dozens of others.

Here’s Kerry’s full statement [PDF] on the divestiture, if you’re for some reason interested.

When the revelations about Rice arose, we noted that even Hillary Clinton had ties (albeit not financial ones) to TransCanada, through a staff person. We also noted yesterday that the decision on Keystone will be Obama’s, not Kerry’s (assuming Kerry is confirmed by the Senate, which he will be). Kerry and his wife — who inherited the Heinz family fortune from her late husband, Sen. John Heinz (R-Penn.) — are worth around $200 million, so even if they donated these investments to charity they’d still probably be able to eat. Maybe only Heinz products, but still.

This divestment is from an abundance of caution as much as the legal obligation to avoid any conflict of interest. It’s not like Kerry was forced to abstain from voting on issues related to economic disparity or the role of complex financial instruments during his tenure in the Senate. Can you imagine? A law mandating that no millionaire member of Congress could vote for any policy benefiting millionaires? We’d pass expanded health care for the middle class by a quorum vote of 6 to 2.

Anyway, this bit of showmanship is now taken care of. As you were, Washington.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Kerry’s new gig weighing in on Keystone means giving up Keystone-related stocks

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