President Biden has put the fight against climate change at the forefront of his administration. By executive order, he has reportedly both rejoined the Paris Climate Accord and revoked the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline on day one. He has repeatedly promised an “all-of-government” approach to the issue, tasking almost every department to tackle climate change. He meant his selection of former Secretary of State John Kerry as “climate envoy” to underscore the seriousness with which a Biden administration hopes to engage on the issue.
Journalists and liberals might cheer Biden’s focus and give his administration an uncritical pass on what is, in reality, a far more complex issue than often portrayed. However, to determine whether Biden’s team is sincere or whether his environmental stance is merely political posturing to the liberal base will come down to one issue: whether Biden’s environmental dream team put the perks of office ahead of the commitment to live what they preach.
Consider Al Gore. There has been no more prominent advocate for the need to combat climate change than the former vice president. But, while he produced films and spoke endlessly on college campuses and in the media about the issue, and even took home the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work, he quite literally burned the midnight oil in his Tennessee mansion, racking up energy bills 21 times greater than that of the average American, while jet-setting around the world.
Alas, Kerry appears to approach the issue with similar hypocrisy. He relished his status as most-traveled Secretary of State, but his travels often blurred the line between diplomatic necessity and taxpayer-funded tourism.
As voters headed to the polls in 2016, Kerry took a large delegation of aides (many of whom now rejoin him in the Biden administration) to Antarctica. The Washington Post reported at the time, Kerry “took helicopter tours of spectacular features like the McMurdo Dry Valleys. … Kerry saw Blood Falls, a bizarre glacier that looks reddish because of the combination of iron and very saline water spilling out of it. … He visited a famous hut where Ernest Shackleton, the Antarctic explorer, lived in 1908. He snapped a photo of an Adelie penguin.”
While Kerry’s press spokesmen said he took the multimillion-dollar trip to the South Pole to learn about climate change, he might have simply just traveled a couple of miles from Washington, D.C., to Alexandria, Virginia, where the National Science Foundation is headquartered. And while Kerry did speak to some scientists during his trip, he might have achieved the same thing minus the fossil fuel consumption had he set up a video conference.
The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced most people to videoconferencing. However, that basic technology has existed for decades. When I briefly served in the George W. Bush administration from 2002 to 2004, officials could speak to diplomats and military officers based abroad by Secure Video Teleconference. At that time, such technology was already well-established. While China’s involvement with Zoom leads many American government and military officials to avoid that platform, both the State Department and U.S. military have embraced other platforms to facilitate videoconferencing against the backdrop of a moratorium on most travel. Diplomatic discussions might be classified, but the U.S. government and its counterparts in Europe and Asia maintain the ability to conduct these on special platforms. Rather than Kerry flying across the globe, he might simply ask his interlocutor to come to the video conference room at the closest U.S. Embassy in order to have a conversation.
Not only would that save Americans hundreds of millions of dollars in travel when the broader administration is considered, but it would show Biden’s commitment to practice what he preaches and to live by the same principles and rules as those he seeks to impose on the people he represents.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
