President Joe Biden has made no secret that climate change is a significant focus of his administration's work while showing little to no concern for that focus' detrimental impacts on the U.S. economy and the country's standing in the world. Biden's climate policy, like most of his administration's policies, has turned out to be rife with hypocrisy as cabinet secretaries and other federal officials fail to live up to the standards set by the president all while lecturing everyday Americans on how they must alter their lives in order to, supposedly, save the planet.
Perhaps the most visible and blatant hypocrite is Biden's Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry who previously served as Secretary of State and now enjoys Cabinet-level status within the Biden White House. Despite his entire job being focused on telling people how they must change their behavior to stop climate change, he is a frequent contributor to greenhouse gas emissions as part of his official Biden administration duties.
That is, Climate Czar Kerry is contributing to the fossil fuel consumption and release of (as he argues) climate change-causing emissions while demanding others cut fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.
In addition to being hypocritical, Kerry — along with the State Department under which his work falls — has been trotting the globe and spewing what he says are problematic emissions while failing to abide by an executive order signed by President Biden in 2021 that requires federal agencies to report their greenhouse gas emissions. That order requires the reporting of greenhouse gas emissions from:
- "Scope 1" sources owned or controlled by a federal agency such as government vehicles
- "Scope 2" sources that generate electricity used to keep the lights on at agency locations
- "Scope 3" sources not owned by but related to an agency's activities such as business travel
Specifically, Biden's "Executive Order on Catalyzing Clean Energy Industries and Jobs Through Federal Sustainability" requires the General Services Administration (GSA) to "develop systems to provide annual reporting of scope 3 emissions, at the Federal and agency level, as appropriate, and calculate relevant categories of scope 3 emissions using the best available methodologies and data sources, due annually on or before January 31."
However, when U.S. Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) along with Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to provide information on the greenhouse gas emissions created by the Biden administration's trip to the UN climate conference last year, there was no accountability to be found.
According to the GAO's response to the senators' request, the State Department still does "not have a systematic way to calculate greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. delegation travel." How convenient, not to mention a violation of Biden's virtue-signaling executive order on supposedly "clean energy" and "federal sustainability."
The trip at the center of the unsatisfied request saw Climate Czar Kerry leading more than 250 U.S. officials representing 17 federal government agencies and entities, via plane, to Egypt, all so he could kick off his "Net-Zero Government Initiative" aimed at asking other countries to quite ironically "lead by example and achieve net-zero emissions from national government operations."
Townhall has learned that, to hold President Biden and his administration to the standard they set for the rest of the country — one they flaunt regularly and without shame — while pointing out the lunacy of Democrats' energy policy, Senator Ernst is introducing the "Executive Branch Emissions Transparency Act." Ernst's bill would require an accounting of future greenhouse gas emissions created by travel embarked upon by President Biden, Climate Czar Kerry, and the rest of the administration.
"If there ever was a meeting that should be an email, it has to be the United Nations climate conference," Sen. Ernst told Townhall exclusively. "Apparently, the gas is always greener when you’re burning fossil fuels in the name of saving the planet," she quipped.
"While waging their war on American-made energy, the Biden administration green-lights the emissions of his climate czar John Kerry and a number of Biden bureaucrats jetting to climate conferences across the world," Ernst noted of the clear double standard. "I’m exposing this hypocrisy."
How can the Biden administration expect to achieve net-zero emissions — an impossible goal, mind you — for the U.S. if the federal government doesn't even know how much it is contributing to what it claims is a serious threat to the world's population? And how can Democrats oppose Ernst's bill, given it would require the accounting of emissions that Biden already ordered with the stroke of his pen?
That federal boondoggle to the UN's climate confab in Egypt was just one of several far-flung destinations to which Kerry, the Biden administration's supposed climate savior, has traveled without accountability as required by Biden's apparently unserious executive order.
If, as Kerry and the Biden administration say, climate change is an existential threat to the United States and the planet itself, why wouldn't these discussions and meetings be conducted over Zoom? Or as Ernst quipped, just "an email"?
Biden's climate czar has made official trips to a number of other destinations, including the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland where he remarked it was "truly extraordinary" to be "able to sit in a room and come together and actually talk about saving the planet." Truly hypocritical, he should have said. Kerry visited Japan for a G7 "Ministers' Meeting on Climate, Energy, and Environment" as well.
Earlier this spring, Kerry made a more than 10,000 mile round trip jet journey that included a stop in Amman (where he attended "the wedding of His Royal Highness Crown Prince Al-Hussein bin Abdullah II of Jordan and Ms. Rajwa Al Seif") before heading to Jerusalem and Dubai to "hold meetings with officials regarding global cooperation to combat the climate crisis."
The next time a government official tells American they need to switch to electric lawn mowers, stop eating beef, avoid having a large family, get rid of their gas stoves, or pipe down about the rising cost of energy, just remember it's all part of the Biden administration and Democrats' unaccountable, hypocritical, royal wedding-attending plan to save the planet.