President Joe Biden must not really believe in global warming.
If he did, he would not have appointed the world’s worst negotiator as his climate czar.
John Kerry, as President Barack Obama’s secretary of state, negotiated the Iran nuclear deal. He handed the world’s No. 1 terrorist regime cash with which to conduct further terrorist operations. In exchange, Iran’s theocratic regime made several promises it never intended to keep and, in many respects, did not keep. But Kerry was so desperate to get a deal signed (any deal at all, no matter how bad) that he allowed himself to be outplayed by Iranian negotiators.
In August 2013, Kerry made a deal that essentially abandoned all hope of holding Syrian dictator Bashar Assad accountable for using chemical weapons against his own population. Through his bumbling brand of diplomacy, Kerry handed control of the situation to Assad’s ally, Vladimir Putin, who went on to violate the deal repeatedly. It would take the election of a new president, Donald Trump, to enforce anything in the deal against the Russians. He followed this up in 2016 by negotiating a Syrian ceasefire that effectively handed control of Syria over to Putin’s Russia. Several years and multiple hospital bombings by Russian forces later, it is evident that this was an unforced error. So was Kerry’s humiliating joint press conference with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, which sent the message that the United States was on board with Russian atrocities in Syria.
In 2014, as Russian paramilitary forces consolidated their control over southeastern Ukraine, Kerry put his faith in his own rhetoric over the kinetic reality of Russian aggression. He opposed arms transfers to Ukraine to resist Russian aggression — again, it took Trump’s election to fix this — and entertained Lavrov’s effort to buy time. The Russians manipulated Kerry so deftly that he never even figured it out.
In short, experience has shown that if you want some serious negotiation, Kerry is the last man on Earth you would ever turn to.
When Biden turned to Kerry as his new special climate envoy, it became clear that the Biden administration’s plan to deal with climate change was to sacrifice every possible American interest in exchange for nothing, except perhaps to make a few smug leftists feel better about themselves.
Indeed, Kerry’s prowess has reared its incapable head once again in Glasgow, Scotland. In exchange for billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars, the genocidal, democracy-crushing regime of the People’s Republic of China has promised to do … basically nothing. The extremely vague language of the agreement requires nothing of China. It states only that both the U.S. and China will take unspecified “enhanced climate actions that raise ambition in the 2020s … in accordance with different national circumstances.” It also stresses “the importance of the commitment made by developed countries” to spend $100 billion on climate change —convenient for China because it considers itself (and it is considered by others for many purposes) to be a “developing” country. So, between the two, all the burdens are shifted to the U.S.
Kerry apparently hopes to use this phony deal to quiet legitimate American objections that carbon restriction is useless without the participation of the world’s largest carbon polluter. Now, he can pretend that China is actually doing something.
Since making its last round of empty climate promises to Obama in 2014, China has continued building new coal-fired power plants unabated. It will continue to do so after this meaningless gesture toward Kerry. Experience shows that Beijing has no scruples about the environment and does not feel bound by any climate promises it makes. Rather, the Chinese government makes climate agreements with developed countries so that those Western countries will slow their economies and China can overtake them in development.
As with his incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan, and his incompetent handling of the crisis at the border that he created, Biden has no idea what he is doing when it comes to the international diplomacy surrounding the issue of climate change. Fortunately, Kerry’s handshake deal is nonbinding. Congress can and should block any spending that would be used to follow through on it.
