John Kerry, an Unlikely Truth-Teller?

John Kerry, America’s special presidential envoy for climate, will be on the world stage during the Biden administration’s online global Leaders Summit on Climate. On Wednesday, he discussed the upcoming summit with Jonathan Capehart on Washington Post Live (H/T Steve Milloy and transcript here). And he let the cat out of the bag:

But the challenge is this, Jonathan. The United States could go to zero [CO2 emissions] tomorrow, I mean we can’t but if you, figuratively speaking, could go to zero, we’d still have a problem. The world would still have a problem. If China went to zero tomorrow with the United States, we’d still have a problem.

China accounts for over 25 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. The United States is second at 15 percent. But even completely eliminating coal, oil, and natural gas as energy sources—which together account for vast majority of total energy consumption in the world’s two top leading energy users—won’t solve the problem.

Envoy Kerry’s statement should give pause to all those elected officials, mostly Republicans (as well as non-profit right-leaning organizations) who think that offering “reasonable” climate policy alternatives to the Green New Deal or similar schemes can be of any political benefit. Their concessions will be used against them.

Establishment climate alarmists will attack them for offering pretend solutions to what they like to call “an existential threat.” Environmental pressure groups will savage them for acting as shills of the big oil companies—many of which are trying the same appeasement strategy. Many observers in the media will ridicule them. And wind and solar investors and the rest of the climate industrial complex will laugh all the way to the bank to deposit their taxpayer subsidies. 

Remember, Kerry says even if the two largest economies in the world went to zero emissions tomorrow, “we’d still have a problem.” So why are we spending trillions on this?