News that President Biden wants budget authority to drop more than half a trillion dollars into the fiscal chasm of climate control reminds us of “Jim Baker’s Blue Jay Yarn.” That’s the tale told by Mark Twain about a blue jay who, spotting a hole in the roof of an empty cabin, starts dropping in acorns, only to get madder and madder as he discovers that the hole won’t fill up, while the acorns are gone.

Twain’s yarn struck us as an apt metaphor, as we were reading the Axios story headlined “Scoop: Biden plan expected to include at least $500B for climate.” That’s more than a quarter of the Biden budget blowout after it was trimmed to $2 trillion. Axios reckons Mr. Biden is hoping Congress will pony up the half-trillion spondulix by the time he arrives in Glasgow for the Conference of the Parties to the Paris Accord.

That shindig starts Sunday, and the idea seems to be that one country after another is going to boast about how much of their taxpayers’ hard-earned money they’re going to drop into various climate coffers. The idea that Mr. Biden hoped our own diplomats could show up with budget authority to boast about $500 billion is mind-boggling. What are they going to do when the money’s dropped in?

That’s where the parable of “Jim Baker’s Blue Jay Yarn” comes in. Baker, whom Twain calls a “simple hearted miner who lived in the mountains of California,” describes the jay who dropped the first acorn into the knothole in the roof of an empty cabin. At first the jay had “the heavenliest smile on his face, while all of a sudden he turned paralyzed into a listening attitude and that smile diminished step by step out of his countenance like breath off’n a razor, and the queerest look of wonder took its location.”

“Why, I didn’t pay attention it fall!” the blue jay exclaimed, meaning he didn’t hear it hit bottom. So the blue jay starts circling the knothole and trying to figure out the problem, before announcing, “I ain’t got no time to idiot around here.” Instead, he flies off to fetch more acorns and drops them into the knothole only to realize the acorns were disappearing into an abyss that he called “a very new type of a hole.”

“Then,” Jim Baker relates the jay “began to get mad. He held in for a spell, walking up and down the comb of the roof and shaking his head and muttering to himself; however his feelings got the upper hand of him, currently, and he broke unfastened and cussed himself black in the face.” Soon he vows to fill up the knothole if it takes a hundred years. Every time he would look into the knothole, though, he’d go “simply pale with rage.”

Eventually, the blue jay enlists five thousand of his fellow jays to fetch acorns and drop them into the knothole and — amid “such any other jawing and disputing and ripping and cussing, you by no means heard” — waiting for the knothole to fill up. Every time a jay looked, he looked up and unburdened himself of a “more snort-headed opinion about the mystery than the jay that went there before him.”

While we were drafting this editorial, ProPublica issued a story under the headline: “There’s No Cheap Way to Deal With the Climate Crisis.” It warns that the half a trillion plus that Mr. Biden wanted Congress to authorize before he fetched up at Glasgow was but chicken feed. “The $3.5 trillion price tag that President Joe Biden proposed for his climate-heavy Build Back Better Act might seem enormous. But over the long term, it will be a pittance.”

Jim Baker’s yarn ends when one jay happens to discover the front door that disclosed the knothole dropped into an empty cabin. It “knocked the thriller galley-west” until, Baker relates, “the entire absurdity . . . hit him home and he fell over backward suffocating with laughter. . .” Whether voters will be in such a good humor when they try to figure out what happened to all of their money as was dumped into the climate cause, well, let us just say that it’ll be some yarn, too.