Money IS Water

Prof. Brad DeLong has an interesting post over at his house in which he assesses the state of affairs after Copenhagen. I strongly recommend that you head there and read it. I’ll just post a few things because I only have ten minutes. Here are his suggestions, sans justifications (in green):

1. 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.
2. Beg the rulers of China and India to properly understand their long-term interests
3. Nationalize the energy industry in the United States.
4. 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.

Here are my preliminary, unadulterated, and unedited thoughts:

First off, stop with the ridiculous metaphors. Money is water. Love is a rose. Happiness is a warm gun. But yes, I agree, we should pour money like sugar into alternative energy technologies.

Second, who is he kidding? True Americans won’t countenance begging. It’s beneath us. Instead, we should make China and India beg us to teach them their long-term interests. We can do that using torture devices, like gags, which I recently discovered was the most-searched-for term on my blog.

Third, “nationalize the energy industry”? Ruh-roh. He’s a socialist-cum-fascist. I can hear the Tea Party rapidly dunking their bags of Earl Grey.

Fourth, “restrict future climate negotiations to a group of seven”? Ruh-roh. He’s an imperialist-cum-totalitarian. I can hear Bill Kristol rubbing his hands together, stroking his kitty, and cackling.

(Sorry for the insincere remarks. I’m deeply in the weeds here with a few things I have to attend to, but once I get a little window, I’ll read through his post more thoroughly and earnestly. For now, I’d be curious to hear what others think.)