In an interview with John Kerry—President Biden’s point-man on climate change diplomacy—the New Yorker’s David Remnick asked the following crucial question:

One of the main difficulties, and there are so many, is that the climate demands sacrifice of everyone to avert catastrophe. Yet we are told we can save the planet and grow the economy at the same time. Transitioning to renewables is going to cost trillions of dollars and upend huge industries. We’re likely to have to eat less meat, use more public transportation. All of this is necessary. To what degree are you and Joe Biden and your foreign counterparts really levelling with everybody?

Here, Remnick channels the obvious: Climate change mitigation is hard. Every act of economic production requires an energy input, and energy production everywhere is a function of fossil fuel combustion, which causes global warming. The upshot is that mitigating climate change requires a wholesale overhaul of the global economy. As Remnick rightly observes, “[t]ransitioning to renewables is going to cost trillions of dollars and upend huge industries.”

Kerry, however, rejected the rock-solid reasoning behind Remnick’s question, answering:

We’re being completely direct and totally transparent. I don’t agree with you that this is sacrifice. I do not believe people will have to necessarily eat differently. Agriculture will change. There’s a lot of research and work being done now on the diet of cattle, for instance. There’s a thing called asparagopsis—I believe that’s the right name—which is a seaweed that, apparently, in its early trials, has reduced if not eliminated flatulence from cattle. I’m confident that there will be huge research done that will change some of these things. All of the economic analyses show that there are millions of jobs to be created.

In the United States, we need to build a legitimate [electrical] grid. We can go to the moon, we can direct a Rover on Mars from Earth, we can invent vaccines, but we can’t send a simple electron from California to New York? In building that smart grid, you will put electricians and plumbers and pipefitters and steelworkers and heavy-equipment operators and countless disciplines to work. There’s so many exciting parts of this. Cars will be electric. They won’t have an internal-combustion engine, but you’re still going to have workers, the United Auto Workers, producing those cars. I just think we’re looking at a remarkable transformation. This will be the biggest economic transformation since the Industrial Revolution, literally. (formatting added)

Kerry, therefore, denies that climate policy involves individual sacrifice. To the contrary, he says that climate policy will “create” millions of jobs, by which he implies that government regulation would (somehow) create wealth. His answer supposes that no one has to pay anything to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, because we’ll all be getting rich from our green jobs and free energy (or something).

Rather than parsing Kerry’s non-answer with follow up questions, Remnick immediately dropped this line of inquiry. Still, the exchange is revealing, in that Kerry’s response reflects the official position of the Biden administration—that Americans can have their climate cake and eat it, too. Last Earth Day, the president described climate regulation as both “a moral imperative” and “an economic imperative.” In a speech last week, Biden gushed that “when I hear ‘climate,’ I think ‘jobs’—good-paying union jobs.”

Seen in the most positive light, the Biden administration is engaging in wishful thinking. Seen in the worst light, this is cynical propaganda. Either way, the ramifications are troubling.

For starters, can President Biden lead on climate policy if he buries his head in the sand about the costs? Yesterday, for example, the White House sought for OPEC to ramp up oil production in an effort to ensure “Americans have access to affordable and reliable energy … at the pump” But this call to OPEC doesn’t make any sense from a climate perspective. High gas prices are a global warming “solution” because they reduce consumption, which lowers greenhouse gas emissions. The president’s messaging—that Americans should have cheap gas—stands diametrically opposed to his climate goals. This glaring contradiction cannot be lost on the rest of the world as Biden calls for international action on global warming.

Another worry pertains to executive authority. President Biden has established sweeping climate goals for his regulators, including the decarbonization of the electric grid by 2035 and the electrification of half the auto fleet by 2030. To meet these goals, the Biden administration asserts vast unilateral powers, based on expansive interpretations of laws that are already on the books. Along these lines, it’s a lot easier to justify a gross expansion of presidential power if one simply pretends that costs don’t exist.