Biden administration climate “Special Envoy,” John Kerry, announced last week he is resigning his position to join President Biden’s campaign for re-election.
Count me a climate “czar” skeptic. Surely there is more to this resignation, which I suspect is a combination of the failure of climate change policies to take hold nationally and globally under Kerry’s watch and that more salient events have transcended the issue including regional conflicts and a teetering global economy. It’s hard to get taken seriously on esoteric climate warnings decades into the future when contemporary wider wars are simultaneously threatening eastern Europe, the Middle East, and in the Taiwan Strait.
Mr. Kerry himself, who last month turned 80 years of age, may be getting tired of being ignored and showing nothing for his efforts these last three years. With ample personal wealth from his second marriage to an heiress of the Heinz ketchup fortune, why bang your head against a climate wall, if you can still windsurf?
Before he heads off to help President Biden’s attempt at re-election, Mr. Kerry is taking one last climate junket, this one to Davos Switzerland for that annual bastion of self-importance and groupthink, the World Economic Forum, which is one of the few places anyone takes him seriously.
There Kerry was confronted by a reporter who challenged him on his hypocrisy of flying carbon-heavy private jets while demanding everyone else lower carbon emissions. “That’s a stupid question,” America’s Climate Envoy responded. Way to think on your feet, Mr. Kerry, especially since this very familiar issue has long plagued you and should come as no surprise.
Having been so accustomed to a fawning, congenial media, America’s climate czar was in no mood for reporter practicing actual journalism by holding him to account for his actions.
This Climate Envoy position was created for Mr. Kerry after President Biden’s election and is often referred to as climate “ambassador.” But ambassadors are subject to approval by the U.S. Senate, and this post received no such action, which made Kerry unanswerable and unaccountable to Congress (though he once appeared before it voluntarily).
Instead, John Kerry has been a senior White House staff member who roamed the planet for three years in private, family-owned aircraft trying to convince nations to reduce carbon emissions to purportedly save the planet. Few listened and fewer cared, outside the United Nations and other global bureaucracies that reside in a bubble, impervious to civilian day-to-day realities and sound science that challenges their climate dogma.
Sure, many nations pay public lip service to some amorphous commitment to “fight” climate change, reduce emissions, shift to alternative energies, blah blah blah. But it is mostly unserious, particularly from larger energy consuming nations like China, India and Russia.
China, the largest emitter of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, signed the Paris Climate Accords in 2015, but committed to nothing before 2030, and will continue to increase its production and use of coal, the biggest climate change bugaboo. Don’t bet the ranch the Chinese Communist Politburo will get climate religion in the next decade and jump on the “net-zero” parade. All the while, John Kerry has played along as though China was a partner and progress was afoot, even as he and the president ignored China’s military aggression and human rights abuses.
At Davos, Mr. Kerry’s tin-ear elitism again was on display as he reiterated the Biden administration’s full-on effort to turn the U.S. into a playland of electric vehicles. Kerry’s embrace of these toys was pure misinformation since they are showing themselves unreliable in cold weather, potentially explosive during flooding, harmful to the planet (if you look askance at increasing strip mining), and exploitive of child labor in the developing world.
Other climate policies are further on the defensive in the U.S. and globally, ranging from corporate America’s pull-back on environmental, social governance (ESG) policies, to opposition by farmers in the Netherlands, Germany and elsewhere protesting government efforts to curtail use of fertilizer and meat products. And, financial commitments by “wealthy” nations to climate mitigation has been pennies to the requested dollar of alleged need.
Lastly, there is the price of gasoline, which has been declining in the U.S. in the last 20 months to a national average of $3.05 per gallon at this writing. That’s a good thing for American consumers, and President Biden is trying to get re-elected, after all. But lower gasoline prices are bad for climate fanatics and the sought-after “transition” to EVs, wind turbines and solar panels, since such “green” energy becomes even less competitive and more impractical against more affordable fossil fuels.
John Kerry’s 40-year career in politics now appears to be sunsetting. He reached many plateaus as a U.S. senator, Secretary of State and presidential nominee of the Democratic party. But climate envoy was a bridge too far and is ending in abject failure.