Which brings us to Joe Biden, and his family's unusually fast scramble to profit from his public office right out the gate.
John Kerry Emitted 302 Tons of CO2 to Save the Planet
Sometimes you have to destroy the environment to save the environment.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
In his last year in office, Secretary of State John Kerry was touting the fact that he had traveled over 1.06 million miles and spent some 96 days in the air in the course of 3 years. The archived State Department site tallies Kerry's total record at 1,417,576 miles and 126 days in the air.
Kerry spent more time flying in 3 years than the average American would in 50 years.
When the Air Force Boeing 757 which ferried Kerry around the world broke down for the fourth time, the media and the foreign policy establishment treated it as some sort of accomplishment.
That might have amounted to something if the ketchup gigolo had done anything in that time except jet around the world to give speeches about the importance of not jetting around the world. Kerry kept racking up miles by flying to Morocco to address the 22nd UN Climate Change Conference, to Indonesia to deliver a speech denouncing unbelievers in global warming, and to Paris to warn that the earth was about to be destroyed if people didn’t stop living like him.
Kerry’s flights would have powered all the appliances in 50 American homes for a year.
"It's the only choice for somebody like me who is traveling the world to win this battle," Kerry recently retorted when a reporter asked him about flying his private jet to Iceland to receive an environmental award. Environmentalists don’t fly coach or even first class. They jet set.
But sometimes you have to destroy the environment to save the environment.
Former Secretary of State John Kerry racked up 302 tons worth of CO2 emissions just from his flight time. Americans would have to burn 100 tons of coal to match the CO2 emissions from Kerry’s jaunts to save the world from people wanting to fly on vacation or heat their homes.
And as Biden’s new ‘Climate Envoy’, Kerry will soon be filling the sky with even more hot air.
Everyone from Moscow to the Middle East knew that Kerry was full of hot air, but not even they would have guessed that John Forbes Kerry was full of 302 tons of hot air. Don’t just think of Kerry as a politician, but as the Exxon Valdez with a “Save the Whales” sticker on the hull.
Biden’s ‘Climate Envoy’ recently argued that coal, oil, and gas workers needed to make better choices and make solar panels. In 2004, Kerry had won the endorsement of the United Mine Workers of America by promising to protect coal jobs. The UMWA didn’t even bother trying to endorse Biden, just as it didn’t try endorsing Obama or Hillary in 2012 and 2016.
The Democrats are militantly anti-coal now. Hillary Clinton had vowed to destroy coal and Kerry thinks coal miners ought to move to China and get jobs constructing toxic solar panels there.
But while the Democrats may be anti-coal, they’re pro-mansion and pro-private jet.
After the Obama regime ended, Kerry went back to using his own private jet to flit around the world, give speeches, and accept awards. Iceland was just one stop on the Kerry world tour.
And then it was back to one of his portfolio of mansions.
“Local sea levels are rising twice as fast as the global average,” Kerry claimed in 2015. Two years later, he and his wife bought a seven-bedroom waterfront house in Martha’s Vineyard.
Much like jetting everywhere, that’s just the sort of island property that a man who sincerely believes that global warming is causing the oceans to rise and flood the world would buy.
Kerry’s homes, like the jet set lifestyle, clash with his apocalyptic environmentalism.
"I don’t see it as all tragedy at all. I mean, yes, there will be tragedy associated with it. It’ll be hard for some people to give up homesteads and move away," Kerry, speaking as Biden's new "Climate Envoy", argued. "So yes, life will be different, but it doesn’t have to be worse."
Not when you can afford to pay for the carbon offsets the way that Kerry does.
It’s not easy being ‘green’. But you don’t have to be green, as Kerry told a reporter in Iceland, "if you offset your carbon, it's the only choice for somebody like me.”
Paying someone else to be ‘green’, which is what carbon offsets amount to, is the modern equivalent of the Civil War practice of allowing the wealthy who were drafted to pay poor people to fight in their place. Life won’t be all that different for John Kerry, aside from giving up an estate on Nantucket for one on Martha’s Vineyard, because he’ll pay the poor to be green.
Trading coal for solar raises energy prices. Attaching carbon taxes to everything will make the cost of living impossible for millions. Air travel will become a thing of the past. For most.
“What I'm doing, almost full time," Kerry whined in Iceland, "is working to win the battle on climate change, and in the end, if I offset and contribute my life to do this, I'm not going to be put on the defensive." And it’s not as if any reporter outside Iceland would dare to even try.
John Forbes Kerry is flying around the world like Superman, fueled by hot air and carbon offsets, to save the world from the rest of us who irresponsibly drive to work and run our air conditioners without caring about the environment. While John Kerry goes through enough CO2 to cover 60 Americans driving their cars for a year because he cares about the environment.
All these years after Vietnam, Lt. Kerry, who collaborated with the Viet Cong to stop a war and launch a political career, is still destroying things to save them. And if these things, whether it’s the people of Vietnam or the planet, never get saved, he still gets rich and famous.
Meanwhile he emits enough CO2 to account for 100 tons of coal while fighting coal with jets.
When John Kerry first got the State Department gig under Obama, he divested a number of resources including millions worth of the Sustainable Technologies Fund which the media described only as a “green energy-oriented private equity firm” while leaving out a key detail.
Leaving out key details when it comes to the dealings of Democrats is the new journalism.
The Sustainable Technologies Fund was co-founded by Andre Heinz: Kerry’s stepson.
“The emergence of new policies and laws aimed at aligning our economic system of production with our environment’s carrying capacity,” STF’s site tells potential investors. “Understanding and predicting the desired goals of such policies is key to an optimal market strategy.”
No doubt.
The conflict of interest here didn’t go away with Kerry and his wife shedding their financial interest in Andre’s Swedish green energy fund. Much like jetting everywhere while lecturing the proles on setting their thermostat too high isn’t vaporized by carbon offsets.
“The time it takes me to get somewhere, I can't sail across the ocean. I have to fly, meet with people and get things done," Kerry argued. The rules never apply to the elites. They can’t. Not when those elites, like John Kerry, are saving us from ourselves by taking on the privileges that we are no longer allowed to exercise for ourselves in the name of the greater good of mankind.
And what sort of skeptic would begrudge the elites from jetting to save us from the jets?
Going ‘green’ is great when you’ve got private equity funds and private jets. It’s a lot less fun when you’re a British pensioner freezing to death in the winter or a French senior citizen dying of heatstroke due to the lack of air conditioning. Greenness means factory workers making $20K a year paying for the Teslas of upper class Californians. It’s oil and gas workers losing their jobs at the behest of environmental consultants pushing Chinese solar panels.
And it’s John Kerry flying a private jet to accept another award ten thousand miles away while emitting enough CO2 to heat an American home. If Biden still lets Americans heat their homes.
Bidens of all sorts are under federal investigation for tax evasion, money-laundering, and unregistered agent foreign ties, as this Politico report citing Hunter notes.
THE BIDEN KLEPTOCRACY
RIDING THE DRAGON: The Bidens' Chinese Secrets (Full Documentary)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRmlcEBAiIs
Chris Hedges: How Republicans, Democrats, and the Media Have Weakened US Democracy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2jyzp09_g8
Schweizer: ‘It’s Going to Be Business as Usual’ for Hunter’s Dealings
20 Jan 20212,342
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On Wednesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Hannity,” Breitbart News senior contributor Peter Schweizer said he reads President Biden’s statements about his son Hunter’s deals as a declaration that “it’s going to be business as usual in the Biden administration as far as these deals are concerned.”
Schweizer said, “Joe Biden has said there are going to be no sketchy overseas deals during his second term. Here’s the problem: He does not believe that the early deals that Hunter was involved in, the China deal, Burisma, he’s never described those as sketchy. So, I read that as saying, it’s going to be business as usual in the Biden administration as far as these deals are concerned.”
Corrupti-looza: Biden family wastes no time profiting from public office
In one-party states such as the old PRI-ruled Mexico, the stealing tended to start late. Before a Mexican president was escorted out for the next, he and his would sweep the presidential palace for everything not nailed down -- the lightbulbs, the toilet seats, the doorknobs and more. There were exceptions, but it was generally the known narrative. In more than one Latin American country, the last-minute asset grab on the way out actually had a name -- "La Pinata." After all, as former PRI mayor of Mexico City, Carlos Hank Gonzalez, used to say: "A politician who's poor is a poor politician."
Which brings us to Joe Biden, and his family's unusually fast scramble to profit from his public office right out the gate.
Joe Biden’s Climate Change China Crisis
President Joe Biden has made fighting climate change the cornerstone of his administration’s domestic and international policies. This presents Biden with a huge China problem.
Biden believes greenhouse gas emissions are causing dangerous climate change. China is the world’s largest emitter of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, emitting more than double America’s present emissions and growing. As such, Biden and his policy team, including John Kerry, his climate change envoy, and Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, see cooperation with China as necessary to reduce the threat of global warming.
Early on, the Biden administration talked tough about China. Biden issued a formal invitation to Taiwan’s representative to his inauguration. In addition, Blinken concurred with his predecessor Mike Pompeo’s determination that China’s treatment of its Muslim Uighur minority is “genocide.” The administration also said previously planned naval exercises in the South China Sea will go forward, as will arms sales to Taiwan. These moves are guaranteed to raise China’s ire.
Although Biden is talking tough with China in public, his policies are already quietly giving Beijing the upper hand in climate negotiations.
Biden’s decision to rejoin the Paris climate agreement puts the United States at a competitive disadvantage with China. The agreement calls for the United States to cut greenhouse gas emissions sharply, which can only realistically be done by reducing the use of our abundant, inexpensive, reliable fossil fuels -- and ultimately by slashing the use of energy overall. The Paris agreement places no restrictions on China, which is building hundreds of coal-fueled power plants that produce reliable, inexpensive electricity.
Biden’s retroactive withdrawal of permission for the Keystone XL pipeline, his ban on new oil and gas leases on public lands, and his revocation of 70 existing permits for oil and gas production, undermines U.S. energy independence.
Biden has also quietly rescinded an executive order former President Donald Trump implemented barring utilities from purchasing Chinese-made equipment critical to the U.S. energy distribution system. On its face, Biden’s action seems to violate his “made in America” policy and is likely to make our power system less secure.
And in late January, just a week into Biden’s tenure as president, Shandong Xinchao (SX), a Chinese energy company, agreed to purchase U.S. oil and gas assets currently producing 9,000 barrels of oil and gas equivalent per day, with proven reserves of 65 million barrels. Because SX operates subject to the whims of the Chinese government, it is unlikely this sale would have gone through under Trump.
China currently controls the production and refining of many rare earth minerals critical to green energy technologies and military systems. Biden’s requirement to shift to an all-electric vehicle fleet and his call for expansion of wind and solar power will likely make the United States even more dependent on China for crucial rare earth minerals.
All of these actions can be seen in bribes intended to entice China to cooperate with the United States on climate change.
On top of all that, China has explicitly linked cooperation with United States on climate change to America abandoning its principled support of human rights and international law. Shortly after Blinken labeled China’s treatment of its minority Uighur Muslim community “genocide,” China’s representative made it clear China’s cooperation on climate matters would depend on the United States ceasing to interfere in matters the Chinese Communist Party considers internal affairs.
“China is ready to cooperate with the United States and the international community on climate change,” China's foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said on January 28, the day after Kerry and Blinken talked tough on China. “I would like to stress that China-U.S. cooperation in specific areas... is closely linked with bilateral relations as a whole.”
“China has emphasized time and again that no one should imagine they can ask China to understand and support them in bilateral and global matters when they blatantly interfere in China’s domestic affairs and undermine China’s interests,” Lijian said, stating the Biden administration should create “favorable conditions” for climate cooperation.
Despite their tough talk, in their near-monomaniacal focus on fighting climate change, Biden and company are already well down the road to giving China more power over the United States. If, to secure cooperation on climate change, Biden reverses previous administrations’ positions on Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, the Uighurs, and U.S. patent holders, millions of people will suffer.
Worst of all, Biden’s actions will diminish the United States’ standing as the world’s leader in defending individual liberty and fundamental human rights from political oppression.
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D. (hburnett@heartland.org) is a senior fellow at The Heartland Institute, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research center headquartered in Arlington Heights, Illinois.
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