To make Earth cooler, we need to decrease a variable on the right side of the equation: We can’t easily lower the sun’s temperature or radius—and clearly meaningful reductions to our heat-trapping, albedo-shifting greenhouse gas emissions are out of the question. So let’s take Representative Gohmert’s advice and simply increase X, the distance to the sun. All we have to do is find a way to move all 5.972 septillion kilograms of Earth’s mass farther away from our star. Easy, right? By Scharringhausen’s calculations, a three-degree-C decrease in temperature to counteract current and near-future anthropogenic warming would require us to move our planet an additional three million kilometers from the sun. Using another back-of-the-envelope calculation, Scharringhausen finds that 5 x 1031 joules could push all 5,972,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms of Earth’s mass three million kilometers out from its present orbit. These numbers present challenges for Representative Gohmert’s plan because annual global electricity production is around 1019 joules, or 0.0000000000002 percent of what we’d need to move the globe. That’s also assuming we can apply all that energy to Earth at 100 percent efficiency, which, thanks to the laws of thermodynamics, is physically impossible.