On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” New York Times columnist Ezra Klein said that “Energy would be cheaper if we just built a bunch of coal plants,” but “decarbonization is a trade-off.”
After Klein said that Texas builds tons of green energy, in part due to its regulatory structure, writer Andrew Sullivan said, “But why aren’t you producing energy from fossils and green energy?”
Klein answered, “Because I think climate change is a problem.” And “if you build a lot of coal plants, it’s going to get a lot worse.”
Klein added, “I don’t mean, like, literally abundance of everything. We define what we think it should be an abundance of, right? If you say, oh, we’ve got an abundance of energy, but the entire state is on fire from wildfires, I’m not going to be like, great, well, we have an abundance of energy, right? You need to choose. One of the dangers of naming your book ‘Abundance’ is people think it’s just more of everything, but it’s actually about trade-offs, right? The core critique that my co-author, Derek Thompson, and I make of Democratic governance is it doesn’t make trade-offs. They pile everything in to every bill, to every project and then things don’t get done. But everything is a trade-off. Yeah, decarbonization is a trade-off. Energy would be cheaper if we just built a bunch of coal plants, but then it’s going to coat our lungs, it’s going to coat our skies, and it’s going to get worse.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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