When confronted with the human misery of a scale unrivaled by anything Europe has experienced since 1945, Kerry shrugs.
There is stiff competition in the category of “dumbest things John Kerry has ever said,” but the former Massachusetts senator and presidential candidate might have outdone himself.
In recent remarks, Joe Biden’s Special Presidential Envoy for Climate maintained that the nerves frayed by Russia’s war of conquest and subjugation in Ukraine might be soothed somewhat if Moscow was more vigorous in its pursuit of John Kerry’s ecological commitments:
“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,” Kerry said during a foreign press briefing on Tuesday in Washington, D.C., his last as the SPEC, as he departed from the position Wednesday to reportedly join President Biden’s presidential re-election campaign.
“Maybe that would open up the door for people to feel better about what Russia is choosing to do at this point in time,” he said.
“I believe that Russia has the ability to be able to make enormous changes if it really wanted to,” Kerry continued. “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.” Indeed, he went on to note that Russia’s “unprovoked, illegal war” has “sadly” halted progress on climate-related issues. “I say ‘sadly’ because it’s a loss for the world not to be able to have Russia acting constructively on this issue,” Joe Biden’s SPEC concluded.
I’m going to go out on a limb and speculate that precisely no one, save perhaps, John Kerry, would be willing to reevaluate Russia’s war if Moscow committed to reducing its aggregate carbon emissions over the course of a decade by a couple of percentage points. Precisely zero observers of the war in Europe would compartmentalize summary execution, rape as a weapon of war, ethnic cleansing on a mass scale, and the subsummation of a sovereign people into Russian captivity because Russia put illusory caps on carbon dioxide and methane discharges. Indeed, in even indulging this fanciful notion, Kerry has only revealed how monomaniacal climate-change alarmists have become.
Russia is not committing itself to deindustrialization because the Kremlin does not define that course to be in its national interests. Russia is, however, committing hundreds of thousands of its young men and billions of rubles to destruction on Ukraine’s battlefields because Moscow has assessed that conquering Ukraine and erasing the concept of Ukrainian nationhood is in its interests. These circumstances should communicate some rather discouraging facts about how Russia sets its national objectives. It’s even more revealing that Kerry believes Moscow could offset some of the goodwill Russia sacrificed amid its war of territorial expansionism by merely gesturing in a direction preferred by climate zealots.
The climate movement to which Kerry is beholden presents itself as infinitely compassionate, consumed by dread over the fate to which humanity will be consigned in an age defined by uncontrolled global warming. Kerry’s comments reveal the extent to which this movement regards humanity in the abstract. When confronted with the human misery of a scale unrivaled by anything Europe has experienced since 1945, Kerry shrugs. What is there to be done about that, after all? Meting out due comeuppance to Russia is just fanciful. Quite unlike saving the plant from its looming heat death. Now that’s something we can do together.