Kerry: ‘There would be no Climate Agreement if there were actual penalties’

Here is something silly from a silly Secretary of State for a Tuesday. Of course it has been reported the U.S. is up for giving $100 Billion for our carbon sins to poor countries, but what the heck. Here Kerry opines on two insights on the Global Warming “agreement.”Kerry: Public Shaming is ‘Most Powerful Weapon in Many Ways’ to Enforce World Climate Agreement. The other astute observation?

While discussing the global climate change agreement made in Paris over the weekend, Secretary of State John Kerry acknowledged on Fox News Sunday that there wouldn’t been an agreement at all if there were binding penalties for countries not meeting emissions standards.

President Obama, Kerry said, was determined to “get an agreement that would move the world in the right direction.” As such, Kerry said that the “best thing we can do” to get countries to reduce their carbon emissions was a “mandatory reporting requirement.”

In a bit of circular logic, Kerry said that countries would have to retool their reduction levels every five years to meet their commitments, but he couldn’t say there was anything beyond their own word to force them to so.

“The best thing we can do in an effort to try to change people’s thinking is to do this mandatory reporting requirement,” Kerry said. “The mandatory reporting requirement has to be updated every five years. Every five years, it is mandatory that countries retool their reduction levels in order to meet the demands of meeting the curve of reduction to which they have committed. So that is a serious form of enforcement, if you will, compliance. But there is no penalty for it, obviously, but if there had been a penalty, we wouldn’t have been able to get an agreement.”

Full transcript at Free Beacon