I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Monday, November 30th.

With us now is John Podesta, who among many other things was White House Chief of Staff under President Bill Clinton,

leader of the Obama-Biden transition team in 2008, chairman of the Hillary Clinton,

presidential campaign in 2016, and founder of the think tank, the Center for American Progress.

And his Twitter feed says, don't blame others for my opinions. John, nice to have you on again.

Welcome back to WNYC. Great to be back on with you, Brian. I'll start with an easy one. You're

excited about John Kerry's appointment I saw, which puts a climate change policymaker in a

cabinet-level position. If you accept that Barack Obama as president took climate seriously,

what difference do you think this new position could make for actual climate policy?

Well, look, I think Joe Biden during the campaign made the climate crisis and investments to deal with that crisis central to his economic

policy and his environmental policy.

I think what this signal sends is that it'll also be central to his security policy and

foreign policy.

And someone with John Kerry's stature can really be a catalyst for what is,

particularly in a very important year in 2021, as we lead-up to the conference of parties,

the so-called cop in Glasgow, which will occur towards the end of the year, to try to bring the

world to greater ambition.

That's what we need in order to solve the climate crisis.

We're not on track even to hit a two-degree rise in global average temperatures, and we have

to go a lot further.

We have to, as Biden and Harris

recognize in the campaign, by mid-century, we have to have a net zero economy, no emissions that are

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