President Biden’s new climate czar John Kerry took a gas-guzzling private jet to collect a climate change leadership award in Iceland in 2019, defending his mode of transport as “the only choice for someone like me.”
The former secretary of state, who is now Biden’s climate change envoy, defended his decidedly un-green choice of transportation when criticized by local media and the Arctic Circle award organizers, arrogantly claiming he had no other option.
“If you offset your carbon, it’s the only choice for somebody like me who is traveling the world to win this battle,” Kerry said in an interview with local outlet RUV, unearthed by Fox News on Wednesday.
“I negotiated the Paris Accords for the United States. I’ve been involved in this fight for years. I negotiated with President Xi to bring President Xi to the table so we could get Paris,” he said.
The former secretary of state continued justifying his big-carbon-footprint choice of travel, saying he didn’t have time to sail the seas while clearly omitting the fact he had the option of flying commercial airlines that transport hundreds of passengers at a time.
“I believe the time it takes to get me somewhere, I can’t sail across the ocean. I have to fly to meet with people and get things done,” Kerry said.
“But what I’m doing, almost full time, is working to win the battle of 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,” he said.
Kerry received the Arctic Circle Award for his chairing Paris Climate Accord negotiations as President Barack Obama’s secretary of state, and delivered a speech at the awards ceremony in Reykjavik in which he said “urgent action” was needed to combat the warming climate.
According to the Fox News report, Arctic Circle founder and former Iceland President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson criticized Kerry for traveling to the event on a private jet.
At a White House briefing last week, Kerry admitted Biden’s push to get the US to zero emissions would not make much of a difference in the global climate change fight.
He also suggested that coal and gas workers impacted by Biden’s plan to fight fossil fuels could easily transition into green jobs — drawing charges of “out of touch” elitism from GOP lawmakers.
Fox News reported that Kerry still owns his Gulfstream private jet, which actually belongs to his billionaire wife Teresa Heinz-Kerry’s private charter jet company.
