When Fox News Digital questioned the White House about whether it agreed with John Kerry's recent remarks bemoaning the carbon impact of the Ukraine war, the White House remained mute.
After being approached several times by Fox News Digital regarding Kerry's remarks, neither the White House nor the National Security Council's spokespeople responded. Last Monday, Kerry reiterated earlier remarks that rising global greenhouse gas emissions are a significant result of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine that is related to Russia's incursion there last year.
During a July 10 interview with MSNBC, Kerry stated that "many regions of the world are currently exacerbating the problem, but when you have bombs going off and you have damage to septic tanks or to power centers, etcetera, you have an enormous release of greenhouse gas, methane, all of the family of greenhouse gasses, and the result is it's adding to the problem."
The war in Ukraine is a struggle that "we have to make," Kerry continued, but there are "ancillary impacts as a result."
Conservatives and Republicans, including presidential candidate Nikki Haley, strongly criticized Kerry's comments when they were made. Haley tweeted, "You can't make this stuff up" and "the end of the Biden (Harris) administration can't come fast enough."
The remarks were the most recent instance of Kerry cautioning about the effects of the fighting in Ukraine on climate change. For instance, Kerry informed several media outlets that he was worried about emissions from a hypothetical military war just before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.