John Kerry has unwittingly exposed the climate change wheeze

Here’s a good wheeze: prod every last inch of your own country, open the taps and become the world’s largest producer of fossil fuels. Then, when other countries start to try to develop their own resources, tell them they mustn’t, for the good of the planet. In other words, make them all dependent on you. That is pretty well what John Kerry, the outgoing US special envoy on climate change, suggested on the BBC’s Today programme this morning. 

‘We do need gas to keep our economies moving but we don’t need to open a whole raft of new exploration,’ he said, adding that US president Joe Biden had made a ‘courageous step’ not to approve a recent gas project. Asked whether this meant that Britain shouldn’t develop new oil and gas fields – as the current government wants to do – he blathered on: 

‘According to the International Energy Agency, they have said we do not need new field exploration and development.