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by Spooky23
2584 days ago
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Goals there were different. Nationalizing those industries and using tariffs to stabilize at a higher price would accelerate adoption of better technology. You could implode demand for natural gas and fuel oil by raising prices and capturing profits to capitalize heat pump adoption in the northeast, for example. |
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I'm fully in favor of "keep it in the ground." But nationalization isn't necessarily the right way. In fact: if someone sufficiently wealthy were able to buy up certain strategic assets, they'd be able to resist public pressure to reopen them. For instance, if you had bought Arch Coal at its nadir when it went bankrupt for about $1.4 billion, you would've had control over 16% of America's coal supply. From what I can tell, billions of tons of coal. You could shut it down for pennies on the dollar versus any carbon sequestration scheme.
Or buy up and close down export terminals (and revitalize the property around them if in urban areas, making back your money easily while crippling the profitability of coal mining in the US).
If it was nationalized, it could as likely go the way of Venezuela, which has (until recently) actually extremely subsidized petroleum consumption.
IMHO, government power should be used to tax these things what they're polluting (the stick), develop regulations while strongly subsidizing clean alternatives (the carrot). Nationalizing the oil industry and jacking up prices is just going to make people mad at you while enabling a successor to completely undo your work.