This week John Kerry followed the tradition of his Democratic party colleague and fellow failed presidential aspirant Al Gore with a whole lot of gratuitous messages about how we are not taking climate change seriously enough.
Gore was famous for warning about us an impending global warming tipping point in his film An Inconvenient Truth.
He then kept trying to raise alarm levels even as people around the world, including Australia, got tired of hearing him repeat himself.
Now we have to put up with Kerry.
Speaking at the Global Table food and agriculture conference in Melbourne, Kerry got stuck into the Australian government's climate and energy policy and put his two bobs worth into the debate about Adani's Carmichael mine in Queensland.
"We just can't sit on our asses and leave the political process to neanderthals who don't want to believe in the future," Kerry said.
"We have a dearth of leadership, but this will turn.
"I got to tell you, we should not be moving to coal, we should not be encouraging coal, we should not be building infrastructure around coal."
US voters failed to vote for Kerry as president and ultimately threw out the Democratic party when Kerry was Secretary of State.
So why does he think that he can come to Australia and tell us we should be moving away from coal?
It seems US politicians can always hit the anti-coal lecture circuit when all else fails.
The worrying thing is that there is no shortage of eager listeners in Australia who are willing to encourage them, despite coal mining exports making a significant contribution to the recent current account surplus.
Hogsback wonders how well informed these visiting celebrities make themselves about Australia's climate change policy before they start mouthing off their coal-hating platitudes.
Domestically, Melbourne Greens MP Adam Bandt is already positioning himself for a life after politics by calling for the complete annihilation of the Australian coal industry - both thermal and metallurgical and both domestic and export - at every opportunity.
If he plays his cards right he might be able to be snag some gigs doing the warm up for Kerry or Gore.
Hogsback reckons what is desperately needed now is an ex-politician who can put the case for coal.
