Your tax dollars at work - today's edition

For swallowers of the "climate change" Kool-Aid, nobody tops Secretary Global-Test. He's called it as big a threat as jihad (actually, his word for that was the more amorphous "Terrorism"). He supports this idiotic Paris "agreement." (He has a track record of supporting idiotic "agreements.")

But his latest stunt is quite an expensive bit of grandstanding on our dime:

there were some obvious questions about this trip which the State Department should have been prepared for before they announced it. First of all and probably most on point is the question of… why? Why is the Secretary of State being sent not just to McMurdo Station on the tip of Ross Island (a much easier and cheaper place to reach) but to the actual South Pole research facility? That’s a fairly hazardous trip at the best of times and I seriously doubt Kerry is going there to conduct any ice core experiments on his own. Is there actually anything going on in that barren location which he couldn’t find out about via a satellite video conference or an in person meeting in Washington with scientists recently returned from their shifts there?

Those questions tie in with the cost to the taxpayers. For your average American citizen to just make it to the coast, either by cruise ship or a flight out of New Zealand, you’re looking at a bill in the twelve to fifteen thousand dollar range per person. And that doesn’t even take into account the additional expense and logistical difficulty of making it all the way to the pole, assuming you can even get permission to go. What sort of costs go into sending the Secretary of state, his staff and security detail to that frozen wilderness? Swinging back to the previous point, those costs should be balanced against whatever excuse they’ve come up with to make the journey a requirement for the nation.

The real explanation, absent something better coming out of the State Department, is that this is nothing more than a very expensive photo op for Kerry. He has no need to be there for any scientific or policy reason, but this is clearly designed to promote climate change “awareness” and dredge up support for the non-ratified Paris climate treaty. If you need a quick layman’s translation of that it simply means a massive carbon tax and hugely expensive executive mandates for more renewable energy which doesn’t currently exist in economically feasible forms. But it sounds great in an election year, so away we go.

Meanwhile, North Korea and Iran continue their missile tests, longtime Pacific Rim allies of the country formerly known as the United States are moving into China's orbit, Russian aircraft buzz US Navy ships at will, and ISIS is calling for terror attacks in the run-up to the post-American election.

Ah, the priorities of the planned-decline party.