Let's buy out Big Oil
https://theweek.com/articles/812709/lets-buy-big-oilDecember 17, 2018
...Think of it this way: Proven reserves of coal, oil, and gas still in the ground are several times as big as what we can burn while staying within the (moderate) safety of a 1.5 degree Celsius global temperature rise. Those reserves are owned by people and corporations, with a total value of $10 trillion to $20 trillion. Preventing catastrophic climate change requires convincing those people and corporations to simply walk away from that vast store of riches: Don't drill it, don't burn it, don't profit from it, don't sell it to anyone else. Simply let it disappear.
This is an absolutely gobsmacking demand. As Chris Hayes once noted, the only precedent in U.S. history for destroying wealth claims on that scale in the name of the greater good is the abolition of slavery — which required the bloodiest war America has ever fought.
Not only is that fossil fuel wealth a gigantic incentive for the industry to keep burning and profiting — it's also a source of enormous political power. In the 2018 election, fossil fuel interests spent over $90 million just to kill three modest state-level climate policy referendums. We just learned that the Trump administration's rollback of car emission standards was driven by Big Oil lobbying. Imagine the fight the industry would put up to stop a national carbon tax, or a Green New Deal effort to build a renewable infrastructure that competes for energy consumers.
So why don't we just buy the fossil fuel industry out and leave all that oil and coal in the ground?
This would neutralize, or at least significantly curtail, the economic incentive that fossil fuel shareholders have to fight back. They'd get to keep their money. In fact, they'd probably get to make money, since the government would need to offer a premium.
Nationalizing the industry could provide a solution to what to do with the 1.1 million people who work in oil, gas, and coal. Laying them off would be terrible. Instead, the government could fold them into the Green New Deal effort, and redirect them to build a renewable energy infrastructure. It could liquidate the physical capital of the fossil fuel industry to the same purpose.
This would cost trillions and trillions of dollars. There is no sugarcoating that figure. It is a gargantuan sum of money that is almost impossible to actually conceptualize....
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The most amazing thing for me in this article is in spite of recognizing the reality of the situation, they still want to proceed with it.
