Vice President Joe Biden says President Barack Obama and France’s new socialist president share the same ambition to regulate carbon emissions.
“I could have been sitting in a private meeting with President Obama [and] he would have not said it in French, he’d say it in English, but you said the same thing,” Biden told President Francois Hollande during a brief Feb. 4 public appearance at the French presidential palace in Paris, France.
“The [French] President pointed out that there … is a need to set out a vision for the young people in both our countries [and] a rallying cry that can be a call for a united effort and support in both our countries to deal with global warming,” declared Biden, who is buffing his foreign-policy credentials prior to a possible run for the presidency in 2016.
In his Jan. 21 presidential inauguration address, Obama touted his support for an extremely expensive wave of “Global Warming” regulation.
“We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations … we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God,” he claimed in his controversial speech..
By spending taxpayers’ money to fund clear-energy research, “we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure, our forests and waterways, our crop lands and snow capped peaks … That’s what will lend meaning to the creed our [founding] fathers once declared,” he announced.
But Hollande is a European style socialist who tends to favor very high-taxes and government ownership companies, including steel, telecommunications, auto and aircraft companies.
Obama is a progressive who favors government direction of private companies, including health-care, energy, auto companies.
That progressive strategy has prompted him to impose a growing array of expensive and anti-carbon regulations on the nation’s energy companies.
But Obama has also derided socialist’s preference for government ownership of companies. For example, Obama laughed at the socialist government of Cuba during an Jan. 30 interview with a Spanish-language TV station.
“It’s time to join the 21st century,” Obama said. “It’s one thing to have cars from the 1950s. It’s another thing when your whole political ideology … is 50 years or 60 years old and it’s been proven not to work.”
Biden also said Obama’s commitment to climate-regulation was demonstrated by his appointment of Sen. John Kerry — the wealthy, French-speaking, Democratic candidate for president in 2004 — to fill the Secretary of State slot in the cabinet.
“As I pointed out to the Foreign Minister, he is going to have an interlocutor in John Kerry,” said Biden. “There is no one in my country who has been, over the period of time he’s been in the Senate, more concerned with or knowledgeable about the issues relating to global warming.”