Lessons from Chavez

A Bold Economist's 4-Step Plan to Stop Climate Change

A lot of folks are getting more and more worried about humankind's general inaction when it comes to combating climate change. World-class economist Brad DeLong of UC Berkeley is one of those folks. In a recent speech and paper, he laid out an intriguing plan on how the developed world should go about planning to fight climate change...
Before we dive in, it should be said that this plan is outright politically infeasible. There's no way that right now, any serious number of politicians would stick their necks out to enact a plan like this. ....
* Pour money like water into research into closed-carbon and non-carbon energy technologies in order to maximize the chance that we will get lucky--on energy technologies at least, if not on climate sensitivity.

* Beg the rulers of China and India to properly understand their long-term interests

* Nationalize the energy industry in the United States.

* Restrict future climate negotiations to a group of seven--the U.S., the E.U., Japan, China, India, Indonesia, and Brazil--and enforce their agreement by substantial and painful trade sanctions on countries that do not accept their place in the resulting negotiated system.


Guess which one is the hardest to swallow, politically? If you didn't pick number 3, pick again! DeLong explains why this must be done:

In general I am opposed to state-run nationalized industries: that is definitely the private sector's place, not the government. But the interaction of rent-seeking politics with the flaws of America's political system have made me willing to make an exception in the case of America's oil industry: the increased allocative inefficiency that will flow from government ownership and management is, in my judgement, likely to be much less than the increased political efficiency that will flow from no longer having the energy industry able to purchase enough Representatives and Senators to block needed policy moves that it fears will be adverse to its interests. So nationalize--not to expropriate or to penalize the shareholders, but to get this particular selfish and destructive political voice out of American governance.

And he's an avowed free market proponent!

Can you hear the cries of the Tea Partiers? Can you hear Rush and Sean drooling getting ready to comment?

But it does make sense.