Tag Archives: Climate Czar John Kerry

A tale of two Johns as SPECs

From CFACT

By Duggan Flanakin

Leave it to Joe Biden. When the 80-year-old plutocrat John Forbes Kerry steps down as Special Presidential Envoy for Climate (SPEC), he chose 75-year-old John David Podesta, Jr., to finish out the year. The two climate czars could not have come from more different beginnings.

For his self-important mission to “save the planet,” Kerry has been called a “climate clown” on social media and “the Forrest Gump of Climate” by Bloomberg Media. Ever the aloof Eurocentric diplomat, Kerry never lets anyone forget how important he is. Podesta, from much more humble roots, prefers to work behind the scenes, often in a supporting role.

It was clearly past time for Kerry to go. The day before he “retired,” Kerry spoke at a press conference and raised eyebrows and temperatures when he blurted out that people might “feel better” about the Russian government if Russia would just commit to fighting climate change as hard as he has done.

Kerry’s strange remarks came in response to a question from a Russian reporter as to whether the long-running U.S. campaign against Russian influence – one that has escalated into a major war that could soon become nuclear – was interfering with climate cooperation. The Russian Federation waited until 2019 – when Paris opponent Donald Trump was President — to adopt the Paris Agreement, overcoming strong opposition from Russian industry lobbyists.

At the time, Rusian Edelgeriev, President Putin’s climate advisor, said his country would become a “full-fledged participant in this international instrument.” He boasted that Russia had cut its carbon emissions nearly in half since 1990, the year of the collapse of the old Soviet Union.

But oil and gas provide about 20 percent of the Russian economy, and Europeans who had shunned fossil fuel production themselves were still heavily dependent on Russian fossil fuels to keep their own economies afloat. Russia today is developing coal resources in the Far East and wants to open more Arctic shipping lanes.

Imagine the grating of teeth in the Kremlin as Kerry droned on that even with its “illegal” war against Ukraine, “they ought to be able to find the effort to be responsible on the climate issue.” Maybe Kerry was saddest that, because of the war, he has not been able to fly back and forth to Moscow (or preferably, to a Crimean dacha?) to “negotiate”.

Missing from Kerry’s diatribe was the well-known fact that Russia only contributes 5 percent of global human-caused carbon dioxide emissions, less than half that of the U.S. (12.6 percent), and only a tiny fraction of China’s whopping 33 percent. But Kerry would not dare tell China it “ought to be more responsible on the climate issue.”

Instead, after lengthy negotiations in Beijing, Kerry insisted he was not disappointed that no new agreements came from his “work,” or that President Xi reaffirmed that China would pursue its climate goals at its own pace and in its own way. Kerry was just glad he got a few free meals.

In his first year as SPEC, Kerry took a reported 48 trips on his wife’s private jet, including meetings with authoritarian heads of state. He refused to publicly criticize China for building a new coal-fired power plant every week. But he did compare the fight against climate change to the Allies’ fight to defeat Nazi Germany.

Young Americans may remember that Kerry was the (losing) Democratic Party nominee for President in 2004. They may also know that, long before became the “climate guy,” Kerry was a spokesperson for Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

The Massachusetts brahmin, after a failed Congressional campaign and a short stint as Michael Dukakis’ lieutenant governor, parlayed his fame (or infamy) into a U.S. Senate seat in 1984. He stayed in the Senate until 2013, when he became President Obama’s Secretary of State, following the inestimable Hillary Clinton. His crowning moment there was signing the Paris Agreement on climate change. No wonder Biden chose him.

As SPEC, Kerry is best known for his defense of his widespread use of private jets. Kerry famously stated, “If you offset your carbon, it is the ONLY choice for somebody like me who is traveling the world to win this battle.”

Kerry’s messianic vision continued: “I have to fly to meet with people to get things done, but what I am doing almost full time is working to win the battle for climate change. And if I offset and contribute my life to do this I am not going to be put on the defensive.”

Kerry loves flying almost as much as mirrors. He even flew on a giant military transport to Antarctica as a lame duck just days after President Trump was elected in 2016 – ostensibly to meet with scientists about the impact of climate change on the frozen continent.

Kerry has always been “special.” His grandmother sent him to elite boarding schools in Europe as his father served in the State Department’s Bureau of United Nations Affairs, then as U.S. attorney for Berlin, and later at the U.S. Embassy in Oslo.

Young John was whisked back to the States to attend more elite boarding schools before matriculating at Yale University, where he distinguished himself as a debater and soccer player but not as a student. His GPA was “lackluster” (a 76 average), but it got him into Yale.

Before marrying the billionaire heiress to John Heinz’s huge fortune, Kerry was already the wealthiest person in the U.S. Senate (other than Heinz), as the beneficiary of at least four trusts inherited from Forbes family relatives. His own 2011 financial disclosure admits to personal assets ranging from $230 to $320 million (not including any Heinz money).

By contrast, 75-year-old John Podesta grew up on the streets of Chicago, the son of a Greek-American mother and an Italian-American father, a factory worker who never finished high school. His big break in life came when he met the young Bill Clinton in 1970 when both were working on a Senate campaign.

John and his older brother Tony built their lives around politics, with John serving as an attorney for various Democratic Party leaders and Tony working as a lobbyist. Together they formed the Podesta Group, a government relations and public affairs lobbying firm with close ties to the Democratic Party. Not bad for a couple of poor kids.

Politics has been good to the Podestas. John served as chief of staff for President Clinton and counselor to President Obama before joining the Biden Administration as senior advisor for clean energy innovation and implementation. There he has overseen the disbursement of $370 to $783 billion in clean energy tax credits and incentives under the (sic) Inflation Reduction Act.

Both Podestas have left their biggest public marks through the political nonprofits they created, Tony was a founding president of Norman Lear’s People for the American Way, while John is the founder and former president of the Center for American Progress, which helped to craft the Inflation Reduction Act, a cash cow for progressive interests.

In sum, while Kerry has often been compared to a strutting peacock, Podesta has long been one of the most effective operatives in Washington and a major architect of the Progressive agenda. Kerry may have gotten a lot of headlines, but Podesta has used the power of the purse to impact the business and diplomatic communities far more effectively.

“Climate Envoy” John Kerry resigns

From CFACT

By Peter Murphy

White House climate “Special Envoy,” John Kerry, announced last week he is resigning his White House climate 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 a pure misinformation since they are increasingly 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 state dollar of need.

Lastly, there is the price of gasoline, which has been declining in the U.S. to 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 sun setting. 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.