President-elect Joe Biden has selected former Secretary of State John Kerry to serve as his climate czar. In that role, Kerry will be responsible for negotiating new U.S. carbon emission commitments alongside those of other nations.
Kerry’s major challenge, then, will be to ensure that America does not get taken for a ride by his foreign counterparts. This is no small concern. For all its rhetoric, the European Union’s climate change policy is mostly hot air. The EU has failed to match its pledges to effected carbon emission action. As Kerry commits America to new emissions targets, he must ensure our allies actually do what they’re promising to do. If not, American businesses and individuals will suffer from the negative economic externalities of carbon emission mandates, even as their European competitors gain an unfair advantage. We must not buy into the idea that a green energy revolution is a simple ecological-economic win-win. The truth is that green energy platforms remain more expensive at both input and output price points.
That said, Kerry’s most important responsibility will rest in holding China to its word on carbon emissions.
This is a critical concern in that the Chinese Communist Party is both the world’s biggest carbon polluter and the world’s greatest climate change hypocrite. Still, Xi Jinping is a clever leader. He knows that China’s carbon covenants are always received with huge fanfare by the Western media and political elite. In turn, Xi has very few qualms about offering big sacrifices. Addressing the United Nations in September, for example, Xi promised China would be carbon neutral by 2060. As with his previous commitments, Xi’s latest lie received a very warm global reaction.
But as I say, it was a lie. Unfortunately, Xi’s carbon claims have about as much association with reality as his oaths of respect for human rights. After all, China continues to build hundreds of highly polluting coal-fired power plants each year! Xi simply sees carbon vows as the easiest and cheapest way to win western favor without actually doing anything. In the end, however, as at last December’s COP-25 Summit, Xi is the world’s carbon-hoaxer-in-chief.
Kerry must thus be astute to reality as it is, rather than reality as he would wish it to be.
Desperate to shift the Biden administration away from President Trump’s pressure strategy toward him, Xi will welcome Kerry’s arrival with bold and beautiful new pledges on joint carbon emissions action. But unless Kerry holds Xi’s words to the data points, those words will entail only unilateral American sacrifice.
