John Kerry, Global Warming Ghoul

John Kerry meeting with President Joe Biden

by I & I Editorial Board: Presidential climate envoy John Kerry stirred up a black cloud last week when he said the workers who lost their jobs over the administration’s decision to shut down Keystone XL pipeline construction could just make solar panels instead. At least he didn’t tell them they should learn to code. But it was a cruel comment nonetheless, and representative of the political left’s careless destruction of livelihoods in service of their climate god.

At a news conference last week, Kerry said “what President Biden wants to do is make sure that those folks” who lost jobs “have better choices, that they have alternatives, that they can be the people who go to work to make the solar panels.” Unsaid yet clearly understood is the Democrats’ contempt for calloused-hand working class Americans – these “deplorables” just can’t make good decisions and need the guiding hand of government to help them avoid the briar patches and potholes of life.

Kerry went on to scrape coarse-grained sandpaper across workers’ wounds when he admitted the executive order to halt the pipeline is a useless gesture that will have no effect on the climate, since “almost 90% of all of the planet’s emissions, global emissions come from outside of U.S. borders.”

“We could go to zero tomorrow and the problem isn’t solved,” he said.

Which tells us the administration’s desperate need for the approval of world leaders who play the same climate game is more important than crafting sensible policy. It’s all about appearances.

This is as good a place as any to pause and point out that Kerry, a former U.S. senator and secretary of state – and an escapee from Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum? – has the carbon footprint of a small nation’s military. He and his wife own a private jet, multiple homes, and at one time sailed the seas in their own luxury yacht. He lives “the lifestyle he publicly says is destroying the planet.”

Boston talk show host and columnist Howie Carr likens Kerry to a man who is “chauffeured to dinner at the Chanticleer Inn on Nantucket and order(s) Halibut a la Provencal with puree pommes ($46) and then wash(es) it down with a moderately priced $600 bottle of Henri Boillot white Burgundy,” and has zero awareness of the lives of men who “go 2,000 feet down into a coal mine on the midnight shift and get black lung.”

That makes it easy for Kerry to back the decision to shut down a pipeline project that might have decreased overall carbon dioxide emissions, and certainly would have eventually created thousands of jobs.

In a meager and condescending defense of the White House’s decision, Kerry said those who lost jobs have “been fed the notion that somehow dealing with climate is coming at their expense,” and claimed that is not the case.

“What’s happening to them,” he said, “is happening because of other market forces already taking place.”

This is so obviously not true. The “perennial gale of creative destruction,” as outlined by Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, is a market force. The economy grows and lost jobs are replaced by more productive jobs. However, when government intrudes, changes are wrought by coercion, not the voluntary and cooperative acts that define market activity.

No matter who was chosen to be the White House’s climate envoy, it would have been the wrong person. Democrats traffic in fear, emotion, hype, and smug certainty where there should be questions. We can’t think of a single one among them who would be suitable for a post that shouldn’t even exist.

But in choosing “one of the biggest gasbags in American politics,” a “lifelong joke” who is “singlehandedly responsible for massive amounts of terrible emissions,” Joe Biden and his handlers took asininity to another level. They showed they are as tone deaf as Kerry. And so goes the growing polarization of the United States.
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Issues & Insights was founded by seasoned journalists of the IBD Editorials page.

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