Even if U.S. emissions were “zero” climate change would not be solved, according to John Kerry, the new “Climate Envoy” in President Joe Biden’s administration.
Kerry, who negotiated the Paris Climate Agreement under President Barack Obama as Secretary of State, was speaking along with National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy at a briefing about President Biden’s forthcoming executive orders on climate change.
The reason that Biden rejoined the Paris Agreement so quickly. ‘Cause he knows that it is urgent. He also knows that Paris alone is not enough, not when almost 90% of all the planet’s omissions, global omissions, come outside of U.S. borders. We could go to zero tomorrow, and the problem isn’t solved. That is why today, one week into the job, President Biden will sign this additional executive set of orders to help move us down the road, ensuring that ambitious private action is global in scope and scale as well as national, here at home. Today, in the order that he will sign, that Gina has described to you, he makes climate central to foreign policy planning, to diplomacy, and to national security preparedness.
On Biden’s first day in the Oval Office, when he revoked the Keystone XL pipeline permit and suspending oil and gas leasing on federal lands. Biden caused widespread layoffs and tens of thousands of lost future job opportunities.
Asked by a reporter what their “message” was to American workers in the fossil fuel industry who are losing their jobs due to Biden’s policies, Kerry replied: “Workers have been fed a false narrative….somehow dealing with climate is coming at their expense. No, it’s not. What’s happening to them is because of other market forces already taking place.” He and McCarthy promised those workers would be able to find new jobs in “green” industries, or perhaps they could benefit from New Deal-style work programs.
McCarthy mentioned the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a revival of a New Deal-era job program, promising that workers who lived in areas where oil, gas, and coal facilities had closed would be able to find work in their own communities rather than having to move to take advantage of jobs in the solar industry or other new industries.
Kerry said that President Biden had emphasized the “need to grow the new jobs that pay better, that are cleaner.” “President Biden wants to make sure those folks have better choices, they could be the people who go to work making solar panels…That is going to be a particular focus of the Build Back Better agenda
Solar panels were a focus of Biden’s first attempt at “green jobs” under President Obama’s stimulus. It ended spectacularly with the failure of Solyndra, a company that Biden and Obama had both raved about.
He said that workers in South Carolina BMW plant could build electric engines, rather than combustion engines.