U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry claimed Thursday that he does not remember dismissing the use of Chinese slave labor to build solar panels.
Kerry made the comments as Republican Rep. Cory Mills of Florida grilled him about the Biden administration’s climate agenda and the human rights downsides of the green energy transition. In a September 2021 interview, Kerry said that “life is full of tough choices” in response to a question about the trade-offs between green energy adoption and human rights as it applies to Uyghur slave labor and solar panels.
“Do you believe the question of whether to import solar panels built on the backs of Uyghur slaves is such a tough choice?” Mills asked Kerry.
“No, of course not,” Kerry said in reply. “I don’t even know– I don’t know what the context is of the conversation you’re referring to,” Kerry continued. (RELATED: ‘They Offset’: John Kerry Defends Billionaires Flying Private To Davos)
The exchange between Kerry and Mills occurred during Thursday’s House Oversight and Accountability Committee’s hearing on the State Department’s climate agenda budget. The State Department drew criticism last month after a Government Accountability Office report found that the agency failed to abide by Biden’s 2021 executive order requiring all federal agencies to keep track of emissions their official activities generate when it did not track the emissions from flights that brought delegates to United Nations climate change conferences in 2021 and 2022.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses detained Uyghur Muslims as slave laborers to produce solar panels, according to a 2021 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The U.S. declared that the CCP is perpetrating a genocide against its Uyghur population in January 2021, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The United Nations also found evidence that the CCP has committed human rights abuses against the Uyghur population, according to Reuters.
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