Well, here I am, the fly in the proverbial punchbowl.

Last week, The Washington Post held a live event in the nation’s capital, hosted by Sally Buzbee. The guest of honor? The only man that could make people yearn for a speech by Dr. Antony Fauci when given the choice – Biden climate czar John Kerry.

Yes, talk, we must, about what Kerry had to say. Why? Because Republicans didn’t do well enough in the midterms. Had there been a true red wave, the Biden administration would be in lame duck status, the Senate under incoming Republican leadership would be lining up committee hearings investigating the lunacy of the first two years, and officials like Kerry would probably have announced they’re stepping away from their portfolios. Instead, Republicans underperformed in marquee matchups, Democrats beat the expectation game, and the leftists populating the Biden administration are still pushing the envelope as far as they can.

Kerry recently returned from Egypt’s COP27 confab and is not at all pleased with the state of play in the drive to reduce the world’s carbon footprint to zero. I’ll spare you a lot of the doom and gloom offered up by the former Massachusetts senator and Democratic presidential candidate. But in a week that saw most political attention on the jaw-dropping revelations from old Twitter management, and the blizzard of distraction stories offered up by legacy media as a way to avoid covering the Twitter scandals, which include collaboration with the Biden administration to suppress that speech, Kerry’s statements got lost in the shuffle.

Demonstrating what a heart he has for human rights and suffering, the former Secretary of State weighed in on what he thinks about the war in Ukraine.

Russia invades a sovereign Ukraine, shells civilian neighborhoods, housing complexes and schools, rapes and pillages the landscape, threatens nuclear holocaust, leaves mass graves behind as they withdraw, and an untold number of war crimes committed, but yeah, slowing down the transition to green energy would have been right there at the top of my list of problems with the war, too. Say what you will about Kerry, but at least he’s focused on the job at hand.

Next up is his takeaway from COP27, which is on the bleak side. Yes, they kinda, sorta came up with an idea for a framework that could eventually turn into a deal that might just be accepted by enough people to possibly turn into action. But the bottom line? The money. It’s always about the money. Nobody internationally really wants to do anything about climate change. What they do want is money. And John Kerry wants to give ours away if it means he gets what he wants in the form of governmental commitments to turn off anything that emits carbon. Kerry said he would be happy if we American taxpayers would go along with a global reparations plan to pay the world back for our technological advances. That’s not really news, however. He’s wanted to buy the world off before now. The question that hasn’t been answered up to now is how much money is going to be necessary.

The kind of scratch Kerry is looking for is between $2.5 and $4.5 trillion dollars per year until 2050. That’s the only way we’re going to get to the commitment levels Kerry is looking for. Let’s do the math, shall we? First, he gave us a range. We know about bureaucrats spending money. We’ve seen them do it. It’s never in the low range. Usually, they underestimate it, and adjust it up as they see fit because they always need more. So we know it’ll never be below $4.5 trillion per year, and it’ll probably be more than that. But let’s give him his premise for now.

$4.5 trillion dollars every year in reparations from now until 2050 is $103.5 trillion dollars. The current debt of the United States stands at $31 trillion. It took us a while to get there. Kerry thinks that’s just petty cash, apparently. I’ll try to explain how much money $103.5 trillion dollars is. Just one trillion dollars laid end to end is a distance of just under 97,000 miles, or more than the distance to the Sun. 103.5 trillion dollars end to end is a hair over 10 trillion miles. That’s almost two light years. And in case you’re not up to speed on how long a light year is, it would take almost 74,000 Earth years to see two light years. It’s a lot of money.

The current U.S. federal spending per year is around $6 trillion dollars. Kerry wants/needs four and a half trillion of it to wallpaper the globe in carbon offset money. Even he knows there’s not enough federal money available for that, so when asked where he’ll get the money, he naturally goes to the biggest pot of money available – the private sector, meaning your money. Our money. A lot of it. U.S. annual GDP in dollars is around $22.8 trillion, and his $4.5 represents a 20% tax on everything. Per year. For the next quarter century. I’m sure we can all absorb that in the name of climate equity, right?

But then you get to the best part. Assume for the sake of the argument that we all go along with Kerry’s wishes. We buy off the rest of the world, go back to the stone age in our own personal usage, and commit to skimming one out of five dollars off the U.S. economy so some remote village somewhere can have it instead. At least we know by suffering through all that economic hardship, at least the climate will be better for our kids and grandkids, so at least we’ve got that going for us.

Wait, what? You mean to tell me that at the end of all this, it will won’t make any difference? We’ll still be in the same crisis mode we’re allegedly in now? Can someone please explain to me why we’re doing all this then? This two-plus decades-long sabotage of capitalism is the only way to convince the CCP we’re serious and that they should begin to think about their power needs, too?

It’s a good thing I’ve reached my word count limit for this particular column, because I’m afraid the next words I’d write would be regrettable.

As you continue your holiday shopping this week and next, keep in the back of your mind what 20% more as a climate tax would look like on your existing budget. And then channel that anger flash constructively into 2024 candidates up and down the ticket that will get us out of these global commitments.