John Kerry is able to do this with a straight face! Joe Biden’s “climate czar,” John Kerry, faced a question about world leaders committed to the fight against global warming flying to their meetings in private jets.
Ben Adler, senior climate editor at Yahoo News, touched on the issue during an interview posted online on Friday. He said that he read that Kerry “recently switched” from flying private to flying commercial.
“No, I didn’t fly private while I was in this job,” Kerry said, flatly rejecting the assertion. “It’s just a misnomer.”
Kerry became the nation’s first special presidential envoy for climate at the very beginning of the Biden Administrati0on. He confessed to having “one, maybe two private flights, which were military flights in order to get to China during COVID.”
“We were forced into that,” he insisted before adding, “I fly commercially.”
Fox News reported last month that Kerry’s family sold their private jet to a New York based-hedge fund. This came after they made headlines for how many trips they took and the hundreds of metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions since the start of the Biden administration.
Adler went after Kerry asking him to respond to critics who say there is hypocrisy in world leaders at the forefront of the climate agenda who also fly private jets to major climate events.
“I’ve talked to them about it,” he replied, in reference to his contemporaries. “They offset — they buy offsets, they offset, and they are working harder than most people I know to be able to try to effect this transition.”
Huh? What does that mean?
Carbon offsets are “tradable ‘rights’ or certificates linked to activities that lower the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere,” according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Climate Portal website.
Kerry helped negotiate the Paris climate agreement in 2019 and he faced criticism for his use of a private jet. He defended himself saying, “If you offset your carbon, it’s the only choice for somebody like me who is traveling the world to win this battle.”
