Juno News - January 16, 2024


John Kerry still doesn’t want to talk about China


Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

175.51657

Word count

487

Sentence count

34


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In Davos, I asked John Kerry a question about China's role in the fight against climate change, and he didn't give me the answer I was hoping for. But he did give me a surprising answer about his love of private jets.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 I'm here at Davos for the World Economic Forum's 2024 annual meeting.
00:00:05.100 You never know who you're going to bump into when more than 2,000 of the world's most powerful political and business figures
00:00:11.240 are all in one place in one little village.
00:00:14.280 They all walk the streets because they're not used to having anyone here that wants to ask them difficult questions.
00:00:19.360 Now, John Kerry, who is the U.S. envoy for climate, he should have known better because I spoke with him a little bit last year.
00:00:25.280 But after giving a lengthy speech about all the things we need to do on climate change, he was very tight-lipped.
00:00:32.440 Now, this year he had a couple more words to say.
00:00:35.000 I asked him a very similar question to what I tried to get an answer on last year,
00:00:39.400 which was whether China is an ally in the fight against climate change.
00:00:44.300 Now, there was a second part to this question, which I didn't really get to ask because he never addressed the first part.
00:00:49.500 But take a look at the exchange first.
00:00:51.160 Mr. Kerry, do you believe China is a good partner in the fight against climate change?
00:00:55.780 I'm not doing an interview right now because I'm late.
00:00:58.840 Well, I'm walking alongside you. I won't make you miss your meeting.
00:01:01.360 We can walk and talk. Do you believe China is a good partner in the fight against climate change?
00:01:04.720 I'm not doing an interview right now.
00:01:05.840 Did you fly private, sir?
00:01:07.420 No, I did not.
00:01:08.880 Nope, I did not.
00:01:10.460 Are you saying he's never flown private?
00:01:12.320 Not us in this job, no.
00:01:13.920 Not in this job.
00:01:15.080 Do you believe your colleagues here should not take private jets here?
00:01:17.480 He can't grab me.
00:01:19.260 He can't grab us.
00:01:20.100 Now, the reason I wanted to ask him about that was to discuss the obvious point,
00:01:25.920 which is that we have Western governments that are forcing their citizens into energy poverty,
00:01:30.760 subjecting them to insane wars on traditional energy sources.
00:01:34.580 In Canada, a very punitive carbon tax,
00:01:36.660 all while China is moving more and more towards industrialization
00:01:40.580 and actually opening coal plants.
00:01:43.260 Now, also, I had to throw in a question there about John Kerry's penchant for using a private jet.
00:01:48.520 Now, what was interesting here is that Kerry has played some word games on this in the past.
00:01:53.000 He said he never owned a private jet.
00:01:55.100 Well, no, his wife did, and he has still ridden on that private jet.
00:01:58.520 Flown, maybe is the better word, on numerous occasions.
00:02:01.480 But as you may have heard there, one of his aides jumped in and said,
00:02:04.080 oh, no, no, no, no, he doesn't fly private since taking this job.
00:02:07.680 Oh, because everyone knows the carbon footprint changes
00:02:10.380 when you take a plum political appointment from Joe Biden.
00:02:14.140 For True North, from Davos, I'm Andrew Lutton.
00:02:16.500 For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.