John Kerry, U.S. special presidential envoy for climate, has confirmed reports that he’s leaving his role as climate czar in order to work on President Joe Biden’s 2024 reelection campaign.
Mr. Kerry made the announcement during a Tuesday appearance at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, and again on Wednesday in an interview with Yahoo Finance at the annual meet-up of global elites.
“I am not retiring, folks,” Mr. Kerry said Tuesday at the Davos forum, adding, “I am shifting my efforts to where I think they can be best used in an election year in the United States.”
In his Wednesday interview with Yahoo Finance, Mr. Kerry said he would be departing from his role as climate envoy sometime this spring.
Asked whether the reason he’s leaving the job is so he can help campaign to reelect President Biden, Mr. Kerry confirmed and explained that he would be violating federal laws if he were to campaign for the president while remaining in his role as climate envoy.
“Well, as a federal employee, I live under something called the Hatch Act, where you’re not supposed to engage in politics—in elected politics, partisan politics,” Mr. Kerry said. “And so what I will really do is regain my own voice by not being a federal employee. And I will campaign for President Biden because I think the stakes are so high, not just in our country and for our country, but for the world.”
Mr. Kerry promised to elaborate further as to why he thinks the stakes are high in the upcoming election once he’s formally out of his role as climate czar, hinting at the constraints of the Hatch Act, which prohibits civil-service employees in the executive branch of the federal government from engaging in some types of political activity.
“I’m not going to go into the why of that and describe it now while I’m in my transition but at some point, I’ll make very clear what I think is at stake in the race and why I want to be engaged in that discussion,” Mr. Kerry said.
Climate Agenda
Asked what would be on his agenda for the next few months until he resigns from his role as climate czar, Mr. Kerry said it would be more of the same.
“Well, the same thing is on the agenda that’s been on the agenda from the beginning when President Biden created this role,” he said. “And that is that the world is behind in this effort to deal with the climate crisis.”
He said he would work intently on accelerating the transition away from fossil fuels and reach net zero by 2050.
“My job in these next weeks is to help in the transition, but to make certain that we are moving full speed and doing as much as we can to excite the business community to step up and help be leading this transition,” he said.
As part of this climate change-fighting agenda, Mr. Kerry recently announced that the United States had committed to not build any new coal-fired power plants and to get rid of existing ones.
“To meet our goal of 100 percent carbon pollution-free electricity by 2035, we need to phase out unabated coal,” Mr. Kerry said in a Dec. 2 statement, and while he did not provide a specific date for when the Biden administration plans to eliminate existing coal plants, other regulatory actions by the administration point to 2035 as the year of ending coal.
Just below 20 percent of U.S. electricity was powered by coal as of October, according to the Department of Energy (DOE).
Several days after Mr. Kerry announced that the United States had joined a coalition of 56 other countries (called the “Power Past Coal Alliance”) in pledging to phase out coal-fired power plants in the United States, former President Donald Trump made critical remarks about this plan—and called for greater U.S. energy independence.
“And John Kerry wants us to stop doing anything we can. We have a country, we have to fire up our factories. Wind is not going to fire up our factories and it’s the most expensive energy,” he continued.
‘Nuclear Global Warming’
President Trump continued his critical remarks about the Biden administration’s climate policies, saying that the United States “can’t allow China to build a factory a week and we do nothing,” adding that he believes America could be “rich again” so long as Mr. Kerry is stopped, citing America’s abundant oil and gas resources.
The former president later said that a much greater threat to the world than global warming is the possibility of a nuclear war, given the major geopolitical tensions around Ukraine and Taiwan.
He said the “only global warming we should be thinking about or worrying about because it could happen tomorrow is nuclear global warming; not global warming.”
Mr. Kerry’s remarks about leaving his role as climate envoy comes as the 54th annual WEF meeting continues until Jan. 19, with a roster that includes prominent individuals from over 100 governments, major international organizations, business leaders, and activists.
Katabella Roberts contributed to this report.
From The Epoch Times
