The World Economic Forum’s ‘First Movers Coalition’ climate change agenda was “modelled” off the effort to roll out vaccines during the Chinese coronavirus crisis, John Kerry said at a COP27 panel in Egypt on Tuesday.
Appearing alongside WEF President Børge Brende and various corporate executives, US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry said that it is urgent for the private sector to pair with governments to realise the goal of preventing the global temperature from rising and to save lives in the allegedly looming global climate crisis.
“We have an enormous challenge before us to bring to scale new technologies and to harness the deeply capable capacity of private sector entrepreneurs in order to bring them to the table because without it, no government has enough money… we need everybody behind this,” Kerry said in a speech before the panel.
“The idea behind the launch of the First Movers Coalition is pretty straightforward, we needed to create demand signals in the market where they didn’t exist, which takes boldness, it takes courage from these executives who have made the decision to be a part of this.
The First Movers Coalition was established ahead of last year’s COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in partnership between the U.S. State Department and Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum. The green project seeks to sign up private firms to commit to green agenda efforts to reduce carbon emissions.
“We modelled it somewhat on the experience on what happened with vaccines, the government said ‘we’ll pay for it, build it,’ and the same thing with SpaceX, if you build it we are going to use it and we’ll pay for it.
“People who were putting capital at risk knew that they could get a return on that capital or at least cover their expenses in the case of something like vaccines, where human life was so at risk. Well, human life is at risk now in the context of the challenges of the global climate crisis,” Kerry warned.
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