For climate campaigners, Donald Trump was the anti-Christ, pooh-poohing climate change and withdrawing the US from the Paris climate agreement. But what of the Biden administration – is it really going to make the climate lobby any happier?

Things may be a little clearer following the visit to Britain of John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, who gave the annual Fulbright lecture at King’s College London on Friday evening. He was certainly keen to assert that America is now wearing a different pair of boots than it was under Trump, telling his audience ‘you need guideposts, and unfortunately in my country many of those guideposts were torn down.’

Britain’s climate establishment appears to treat US Democratic politicians very differently to Britain’s Conservative government

Kerry is very good at evangelising, preaching that the world is in peril and that it is down to all of us to do something about it. I wonder how many of his audience even questioned his claim that 10 million people are dying annually from the heat – a statistic that he used to illustrate the urgency of action in what he referred to as the world’s hottest year ever (a premature claim given that there are another three weeks to go yet). Kerry didn’t tell us where his 10 million figure came from, but it is likely a garbled reference to an Australian study published in Lancet Planetary Health in July 2021, which was widely reported – and misreported – at the time. Actually, the study claims that 5 million deaths a year can be attributed to extreme temperatures – either high or low. In fact, in the study cold-related deaths were found to outnumber heat-related deaths nearly ten to one. The bias towards cold-related deaths showed up even in Africa – indeed, paradoxically, it was especially strong there, with 1.18 million deaths a year attributed to the cold and 25,500 attributed to the heat.

While the study found a slight increasing trend in heat-related deaths – up by 0.21 percentage points between 2000 and 2019, this was outweighed by a fall in cold-related deaths, which fell by 0.51 percentage points over the same period. One of the authors of the study, Professor Yuming Guo of Monash University in Melbourne, noted that while heat-related deaths would like continue to rise with global warming, the net result in the short to medium term is likely to be fewer overall temperature-related deaths as fewer people are exposed to cold extremes.

It is quite shocking to catch out the US climate envoy appear to give such a misleading impression of what the evidence tells us on heat-related deaths. But let’s leave that aside for the moment. If you are a representative of the US government preaching about the urgency of tackling climate change you might be expected to be able to announce some pretty drastic action on the part of your country in cutting greenhouse gas emissions. So what was Kerry able to announce? He talked of technologies to cut methane emissions and carbon capture and storage (CCUS) – which angers many climate activists because they see it as a means for fossil fuel companies to justify their continued existence. He praised Egypt for closing down gas power stations (the gas, he suggested, was going to go the Europe instead, making up a much-needed shortfall). He reiterated plans he had announced at COP27 in Egypt for an Energy Transition Accelerator, whereby developing countries would be paid to close down coal plants and invest in renewable energy instead. He spoke of America bearing this and other financial burdens, such as helping developing countries cope with extreme weather.

But there was a gaping hole in what he said, which became more glaring the more he went on. Here he was, addressing an audience in a country which has legally-committed itself to reaching net zero emissions by 2050 but representing a country which has made no such commitment, and, to judge by Kerry, doesn’t look like doing so, either. The most the US has done is set itself a target – not a commitment written in law – to reduce emissions by 50 to 52 per cent of 1990 levels by 2030. When you had, in 1990, among the highest per-capita emissions in the world, that it not the most exacting of targets. Even Donald Trump made significant progress towards this target thanks to shale gas continuing to displace coal during his time in office.

After Kerry had sat down, former Labour MP Baroness Hayman took to the stage to berate the UK government for approving Britain’s first coal mine (producing coking coal for the steel industry) in 30 years. But why didn’t she turn round and berate John Kerry for the US’s continuing expansion of its fossil fuel industry? The US government expects gas production to increase from 98.1 billion cubic feet a day in 2022 to 100.4 billion cubic feet a day in 2023. The US will also produce 592 million tonnes of coal in 2022.

Britain’s climate establishment appears to treat US Democratic politicians very differently to Britain’s Conservative government. Not, of course, that we should be ungrateful for America’s expanding shale gas industry: last week Joe Biden did a deal with Rishi Sunak to export more liquified natural gas (LNG) to Britain – a resource without which we would be pretty stuffed at the moment.

Kerry isn’t stupid. He knows that he would never sell Britain’s climate and energy policy to his own voters. The Biden administration’s climate policy seems pretty clear: it will continue to promote shale gas over coal, and to tackle fugitive methane emissions from the gas industry. It will also pay for developing countries to forego the opportunity to grow their own economies with cheap fossil fuels. It will offer subsidies to investors in green energy and to buyers of electric cars, on the condition that they are made in America – a provision in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA as Kerry unfortunately referred to it, forgetting what those initials tend to stand for in Britain.

But no, America is not going to eliminate its fossil fuel industry; it is going to grow it. And neither is it going to try to force itself down the rabbit hole of net zero. But if Britain’s self-denial in refusing to exploit its own fossil fuel reserves creates export opportunities for US producers, then so much the better. Before the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 the first President Bush made clear that the American lifestyle was not up for negotiation. That is still the position of Kerry and Biden. Were they British Conservative ministers they would be harangued at every opportunity by the same people who praise them now.

The post John Kerry gets an easy ride from the climate establishment appeared first on The Spectator.