On Thursday, former Secretary of State John Kerry pontificated that The Trump administration will “kill more Americans” because of their actions vis-à-vis environmental regulations. Kerry intoned, “The insidiousness of the Trump administration using the coronavirus moment as cover — where people are highly preoccupied with health and safety and their lives — and they’re attacking these rules, which will actually kill more Americans, make more people sick, you can’t dream that kind of thing up.”
Interviewed on Yahoo News’ “Skullduggery” podcast, Kerry referenced the Trump administration’s decision to create a new method of estimating the costs and benefits of restricting mercury pollution.
Kerry said, “It’s a tragedy. It’s stupid. It’s absolutely counterproductive. There are reasons that those rules are put in place because mercury kills people. Because these pollutants kill people … Rachel Carson in the 1960s was fighting to protect people from DDT …”
Kerry described Carson’s fight to stop the spraying of DDT, but he did not mention that when the spraying of DDT stopped, millions more people died from malaria. Even the leftist Daily Beastadmitted:
… her crusade against one pesticide cost millions of people their lives …Although DDT soon became synonymous with poison, the pesticide was an effective weapon in the fight against an infection that has killed—and continues to kill—more people than any other: malaria. By 1960, due largely to DDT, malaria had been eliminated from eleven countries, including the United States. As malaria rates went down, life expectancies went up; as did crop production, land values, and relative wealth … Since the mid 1970s, when DDT was eliminated from global eradication efforts, tens of millions of people have died from malaria unnecessarily: most have been children less than five years old.
Kerry continued, “The bottom line is the weakening of these regulations is now rampant, and the insidiousness of the Trump administration using the coronavirus moment as cover — where people are highly preoccupied with health and safety and their lives — and they’re attacking these rules, which will actually kill more Americans, make more people sick, you can’t dream that kind of thing up. George Orwell never conceived of quite such a topsy-turvy situation. And I don’t think anybody’s ever dreamt we’d have a president who’s quite such an enemy of common sense and facts and science.”
Kerry stated:
We’ve had 25 years of people doubting science, claiming on an ideological basis, we don’t have to move; we don’t have to do things; and proposing to Americans a completely contrived, artificial choice. They say, “If we do what the people who want to solve climate want to do it’s gonna hurt our economy; it’s gonna hurt your jobs; it’s gonna take away your quality of life.” That’s a lie. That’s a complete and total fabrication of the choice that we face.
Well, it’s no secret anywhere in the international community that the United States has lost ground, serious ground, over the course of these last years of the administration. Pulling out of the TPP … the president has attacked NATO, criticized our friends … and sided with dictators across the world … I heard countless conversations in which people wondered why the United States has pulled back …
Kerry attacked the Trump administration’s intent to pull funding from the World Health Organization:
You take something like the World Health Organization, I wouldn’t say our Congress is working very effectively. There are a whole bunch of institutions here that aren’t working effectively. And so don’t be surprised that you find a hiccup here or there in some international institution. But the World Health Institution (sic), this is the moment that they need to be strengthened; this is the moment they need to be fully funded and even plussed up in terms of their budget.
And when the president pulls out support for the WHO, he’s not just hurting them immediately in terms of their budget for something he didn’t need to do, by the way, they would fix the things that need to be fixed. He is hurting us, because the World Health Organization is critical to managing the health crises of the world. And if you don’t want the next pandemic to hurt us, the last thing you ought to do is be defunding the World Health Organization.