John Kerry — former senator, onetime Democrat candidate for president, and special presidential envoy for climate (SPEC) to President Joe Biden — said on Tuesday that people around the world might “feel better” about the Russian government if it invests as much effort into fighting climate change as it puts into fighting Ukraine.
Kerry made the jaw-dropping comment at a press conference in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, the day before he retired as SPEC to join Biden’s reelection campaign.
A Russian reporter asked if the state of relations between the U.S. and Russia was interfering with climate cooperation, quoting a Russian official who complained that Western sanctions made it difficult for Moscow to invest in green energy.
“In this regards, do you think that the Western sanctions are affecting global efforts to fight climate change and the shared commitments under the Paris Agreement?” the reporter asked.
Kerry responded:
No, I don’t. Because 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’s one [of] the largest emitters 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. Maybe that would open up the door for people to feel better about what Russia is choosing to do at this point in time.
Kerry’s clumsily worded response was widely interpreted to mean “people would feel better about the Russian invasion of Ukraine if Russia did more to control its emissions,” though a more charitable interpretation would be along the lines of, “if Russia has the resources to invade another country, it could do more to fight climate change.”
Fox News noted this was not the first time Kerry rambled about climate change while discussing the war in Ukraine. For example, in a July 2023 MSNBC interview, he asked viewers to think about all the greenhouse gas emissions from Russia’s intense bombing campaign:
Lots of parts of the world are exacerbating the problem right now, but when you have bombs going off, and you have damage to septic tanks or to power centers, etcetera, you have an enormous release of greenhouse gas, methane, all of the family of greenhouse gasses and the result is it’s adding to the problem.
In February 2022, he pleaded with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin to think about the climate effects of dropping hot bombs on the frozen terrain of Ukraine. Later that same day, he complained that Putin’s rambunctious behavior was complicating efforts to fight climate change, but he would try to “compartmentalize” and look past all those dead Ukrainians.
The Wall Street Journal pointed out that Kerry’s risible comments in February 2022 were not a “gaffe” but a window into the Biden administration’s dangerous “obsession with climate, and with punishing fossil-fuel production, which has made the U.S. and Europe vulnerable to Mr. Putin’s energy blackmail.” The fact that Kerry held the post for two more years and then dropped his most outrageous comments to date on his way to join the Biden reelection campaign would seem to vindicate this analysis.
Even longtime critics of Kerry had difficulty believing he went so far off the deep end on Tuesday. Most of them hewed to the less generous interpretation of his remarks, namely that he was saying the invasion of Ukraine would be less objectionable if the Russians had attacked in a more carbon-neutral manner.
The New York Post collected some choice reactions from social media, including users who called Kerry a “raving lunatic” and a “climate clown” spewing “insane gibberish.”
“I had to listen to this three times to make sure Kerry really said this. And he did. Embarrassing beyond words, and quite frankly, utterly offensive!” said Arsen Ostrovsky, CEO of the International Legal Forum.
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