What we usually hear about when the subject is climate change is stuff meant to scare you out of your socks. Rising oceans, violent storms, draughts, famines, plagues of locusts … and so forth. The implied alternative is austerity so severe – no cars, rationed electricity, smaller houses, once-a-week cold showers, etc. – that people are inclined to think, “Well, that will never happen,” and tune out.

Secretary of State John Kerry is a believer and a scold of those who are called “deniers” to smear them as akin to those who believe the Holocaust never happened.  Mr. Kerry is, himself, a big energy consumer.  One trembles to contemplate the size of his personal carbon footprint, not to mention the number of tons of the stuff he has dumped into the atmosphere on the government’s dime. And he is now trying on a new argument. It is a variation on the old, “in crisis, opportunity line,” and the way Kerry sees it, as reported by Kyle Balluck of The Hill: