March 7, 2024

If you like your politics to be funny, John Kerry is the gift that keeps on giving. A video has emerged of Kerry—America’s “climate czar”—giving Russia a way to rejoin the Western fold. He doesn’t have to stop waging war on Ukraine. He just needs to hop on the climate bandwagon.

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Kerry has always been a pompous windbag, exhaling with his ponderous, portentous pronouncements much more CO2 than he can ever recycle by inhaling that same CO2 back in again. He’s also a reminder that, while speaking in heavy, pontific tones can seem professorial and knowledgeable, that’s performative. It has nothing to do with a person’s intelligence, knowledge or, perhaps most importantly, moral stature.

All of that gets me to this most recent marvel of John Kerry-ism, in which he laboriously explains that, if Russia wants to rehabilitate itself in the public eye, it must limit its CO2 emissions or, at the very least, promise to do so:

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I believe that Russia has the ability to be able to make enormous changes if it really wanted to. I mean, if Russia has the ability to wage a war illegally and invade another country they ought to be able to find the effort to be responsible on the climate issue. And unfortunately, because of the actions that Russia took in an unprovoked, illegal war against another nation, we have not been engaged in discussions with Russia, sadly. I say sadly because it’s a loss for the world not to be able to have Russia acting constructively on this issue.

But we need every country, including Russia—Russia is one of the largest emitters of the emitters [sic] in the world. If Russia wanted to show good faith, they could go out and announce what their reductions are going to be and make a greater effort to reduce emissions now, and maybe that would open up the door for people to feel better about what Russia is choosing to do at this point in time.

There you have it: War is polluting (lots of carbon emissions with all that equipment and all those bombs), but Russia could redeem itself by promising to be a better CO2 world citizen.

Aside from the idiocy, what Kerry said is strictly honest but, in fact, completely dishonest. It’s a lie through omission.

It’s true that “Russia is one of the largest emitters in the world.” However, that’s not saying much. In 2022, the world’s largest carbon emitter was the conglomerate of the European Union, with 38,521,998 kilotons of CO2 per year. China was second, with 12,667,428.4 kilotons; the US was third, with 4,853,780.2 kilotons; India was fourth, with 2,693,034.1 kilotons; and Russia came in at a very lagging fifth with 1,909,039.3 kilotons. In other words, Russia is in the top five but it’s a long, long way from the winners’ platform.

As I said, Kerry is always good for a laugh. However, what’s not laughable is that this man is a former Secretary of State and a current high-level U.S. government official. The laugh is on us that someone with this third-rate intellect is apparently the best that America has to offer to the world. We are not a serious country, and our enemies know it.