The world has only more nine more years to “avert the worst consequences” of the climate crisis, warned President Biden’s “climate envoy,” former senator and secretary of state John Kerry.
“[T]he scientists told us three years ago we had 12 years to avert the worst consequences of climate crisis. We are now three years gone, so we have nine years left,” he told CBS “This Morning” reporter Ben Tracy in an interview that aired Friday, reported Breitbart News.
“There’s no room for B.S. anymore,” Kerry said. “There’s no faking it on this one.”
Kerry’s warnings of a 2030 deadline for the planet is based on interpretations of a special report in 2018 by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The Guardian newspaper headlined its article on the report “We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns U.N.” But even the report’s supporters acknowledge it doesn’t say that. It concludes that if governments want to limit global warming to 1 degree Fahrenheit above today’s levels, they must reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about half by 2030 and to net zero by around midcentury.
In 1992, at the Rio Climate Summit, activists said the world had only 10 years to get global warming under control.
Kerry said in the CBS interview that the severe winter weather across the country is “directly related to the warming, even though your instinct is to say, wait a minute, this is the new ice age.”
“But it’s not.” Kerry insisted. “It is coming from the global warming, and it threatens all the normal weather patterns.”
However, Kerry said that even if “we did everything that we said we were going to do when we signed up in Paris, we would see a rise in the Earth’s temperature to somewhere around 3.7 degrees or more, which is catastrophic.”
Biden announced Friday that the U.S. has officially rejoined the Paris accord, without Senate ratification, one month after signing a directive reversing the Trump administration’s exit.
Biden said in an announcement Friday at the virtual Munich Security Conference that the United States can “no longer delay or do the bare minimum to address climate change.”
“This is a global existential crisis,” Biden said. “As of today, the United States is officially once again party to the Paris agreement, which we helped put together.”
The tipping-point warning isn’t new, as British scientist Philip Stott shows in a summary cited by Marc Morano in his book “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change.”
“In essence, the Earth has been given a 10-year survival warning regularly for the last fifty or so years. We have been serially doomed,” Stott said. “Our post-modern period of climate change angst can probably be traced back to the late-1960s, if not earlier. By 1973, and the ‘global cooling’ scare, it was in full swing, with predictions of the imminent collapse of the world within ten to twenty years, exacerbated by the impacts of a nuclear winter.”
302 tons of carbon
Some of Kerry’s critics have noted his regular travel by private jet. In his last year as secretary of state, he boasted of traveling more than 1 million miles over three years.
Spewing an estimated 302 tons of carbon, he spent more time flying in those three years than the average American would in 50 years, noted Daniel Greenfield in a FrontPage Magazine column. Americans would have to burn 100 tons of coal to match Kerry’s CO2 emissions, he said.
Kerry justified his choice of travel after flying in his private jet to Iceland to receive an environmental award.
“It’s the only choice for somebody like me who is traveling the world to win this battle,” he replied after a reporter confronted him with the issue.
Another famous environmentalist jetsetter, Bill Gates, has “pleaded guilty” to his climate sins.
“It’s true that my carbon footprint is absurdly high. For a long time I have felt guilty about this,” the Microsoft billionaire said in an interview reported a week ago by the London Guardian.
Gates said “shrinking my carbon footprint is the least that can be expected of someone in my position.”
In 2020, he said, he started buying “sustainable jet fuel” and “will fully offset my family’s aviation emissions in 2021.”
“I am aware that I’m an imperfect messenger on climate change. The world is not exactly lacking in rich men with big ideas about what other people should do, or who think technology can fix any problem,” Gates said. “I own big houses and fly in private planes – in fact, I took one to Paris for the climate conference, so who am I to lecture anyone on the environment?
“I plead guilty to all three charges. I can’t deny being a rich guy with an opinion.”
’21st-century papal indulgences’
The idea of “offsetting” one’s “carbon footprint” through “carbon credits” is dubious, according to a study reported by Climate Depot that concluded the credits provide “little or no environmental gain,” amounting to “21st-century papal indulgences.”
The 2016 study found that 73% of carbon credits supported projects that would have happened anyway.
“If a private jet emits roughly eight times as much per passenger as a 747, the most reliable way to reduce its impact is to leave it on the tarmac,” the report said.
Climate Depot also published a point-by-point rebuttal to a new 168-page U.N. report that contends massive changes in society are needed to save the earth.
While in Iceland accepting his environmental award, Kerry seemed to suggest that his climate work was an “offset” in itself.
He said that what he is “doing, almost full time, 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.”
Greenfield observed that carbon offsets amount to paying someone else to be “green.” It’s the modern equivalent, he said, of the Civil War practice of allowing the wealthy who were drafted to pay poor people to fight in their place.
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