Some Straight Talk on What to Do About Climate Change
Prompted by (but not the same as) Al Gore’s Latest Climate Change TED Talk (and a Pitch to Steve Ballmer)
The most important policy topic being discussed on Substack and elsewhere these days (apart from the return of Trump’s tariff craziness this week) relates to the devastating consequences of the One Big Beautiful Bill (“OBBB”), especially for 16 million Americans likely to lose their health care coverage under Medicaid or the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) – but, cynically, not until 2027 or even 2028, or well after the November 2026 mid-terms. I have nothing new to add on this subject, except to strongly suggest readers take in this terrific interview of the MIT economist most responsible for the ACA, Jonathan Gruber, conducted by Nobel laureate Paul Krugman. Gruber (and Krugman):
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Gruber not only provides the most thorough explanation I have seen of the coming cuts in Medicaid and Obamacare, and why they are not just heartless but also in the long-run economically self-defeating (and why the “work requirements” for Medicaid and the “income verifications” added to Obamacare, in practice, while good for soundbites, are designed to cut off many people’s benefits, period, much like poll taxes and long citizenship tests that were once used to keep black American from voting). Along the way, Gruber also explains the politics of why Medicare for All is likely never to become law, as well as the huge costs the US economy will suffer over the long run on account of the Trump Administration’s gutting of federal support for science.
And this excellent conversation/interview doesn’t even get into the deficit-augmenting aspects of the OBBB that will keep long-term interest rates (including mortgage rates) high, or the greatly amped up deportation program the bill will fund, which will destroy the lives of potentially millions of hard-working immigrants and their families, but also devastate many small businesses (and harm even some big ones) throughout the country. https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2025/0708
But in this post, I turn to another subject – climate change -- that also should be much in the news because we’re in the middle of the summer when parts of the country (Phoenix and elsewhere) are suffering from inhuman heat conditions and deadly weather aggravated by climate change, of which the horrible Texas flooding disaster early in the morning of July 4th is yet another example: https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2025/07/devastating-flash-floods-slam-texas-hill-country-tropical-storm-chantal-heads-for-carolinas/. The OBBB also makes it timely to discuss climate change because of what it does to make the problem worse: giving new incentives for the use of coal, which is not the “clean” source of energy that President Trump touts it to be, while taking away incentives for renewable energy (solar and wind), which is clean. All at a time when China is rapidly rolling out both more solar energy and wind power projects (again, Trump is wrong when he falsely states otherwise) and is on pace to have its solar generation capacity outstrip its coal generation capacity by 2030. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-solar-wind-power-installed-capacity-soars-2024-2025-01-21/.
But given the Trump administration’s hostility to doing anything about climate change, it will be at least 3 and a half years before the US government will have another chance to try. However, by then, CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere will be even higher than the current 420 parts per million (ppm), which is already way above 350 ppm, once considered the upper limit of a “safe” ambient CO2 concentration level. https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide; see also https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-the-world-passed-a-carbon-threshold-400ppm-and-why-it-matters. The strong temptation, if Democrats return to power in 2029, I strongly suspect, will be not only to reverse Trump’s policies, but to double down on efforts to reduce CO2 emissions by moving even more rapidly away from fossil fuels, coupled with even more alarmism about what will happen if the country fails to do that.
Former Vice President Al Gore provides an example, but he is hardly the only one. To his great credit, Gore was one of the first major political figures to have warned the US and the world about climate change and to advocate for aggressive action to replace fossil fuels with renewables. His latest TED talk, released in early July, renews this advocacy, highlighting the progress that has been made in recent years in reducing CO2 emissions, but warns (even before the OBBB was enacted) that without much more aggressive action to curb the use of fossil fuels, more climate-related weather/heat catastrophes will follow. https://www.ted.com/talks/al_gore_why_climate_action_is_unstoppable_and_climate_realism_is_a_myth. Gore expressly criticizes those whom he calls “climate realists” – those who don’t share his advocacy of ridding economies of fossil fuels as rapidly as he (and other climate activists) want -- as being far too timid. Gore also dismisses carbon capture, including direct air capture, designed to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere, as a “fraud.”
I share Gore’s view that climate change is an existential challenge, but I believe he unfairly dismisses climate realism, while wrongly implying that if only CO2 emissions growth could be curbed much more substantially, that the climate catastrophes he speaks of, and which we all are already experiencing, somehow will go away, or be less frequent. Moreover, I will explain why, if the Democrats return to power, instead of trying to erase Trump 2.0 on climate change by simply reinstating the clean energy subsidies and climate regulations that were implemented by the Biden Administration, they should instead finally embrace a carbon tax.
Where Gore Goes Wrong
Before I elaborate on each of these points, I want readers to know that I think very highly of Al Gore. I had the privilege of indirectly working for him during the first Clinton Administration, as the Justice Department’s main representative on a small working group of telecommunications experts across the administration whom Gore, as Vice President, convened weekly in 1995, to discuss administration telecommunications matters and the Administration’s role in what eventually became the Telecommunications Act of 1996. It was an honor and privilege to have been part of this group, and to witness first-hand Gore’s graciousness, high intelligence, expert knowledge, and humor (which unfortunately the public never got to see). But now to my critiques.
First, about climate realism. Without naming them, Gore attacks one of its leading advocates, Richard Haass, emeritus president of the Council on Foreign Relations, and my former Brookings colleague. Writing with Carolyn Kissane, Haass makes what should be an obvious point: our deeply divided country is not politically ready to embrace the kind of radical de-fossil fuel agenda that Gore and activists like Greta Thunberg advocate. The “reality” is that 80% of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/climate-crisis-in-age-of-trump-by-richard-haass-and-carolyn-kissane-2025-02. We’re not going to rip up that infrastructure overnight, no matter how strident the climate change alarms become. The public, especially working-class voters, just won’t support it: over 70% favor an “all of the above” energy strategy, according to the most recent thorough polling data. https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/the-science-vs-the-narrative-vs-the-voters-clarifying-the-public-debate-around-energy-and-climate/.
Second, Gore’s singular focus on CO2 emissions, which is not unusual because the media and other climate activists do the same thing, gives listeners and voters the impression that if we in the US somehow magically got off our fossil fuel addiction, all or maybe most of the severe weather/heat consequences of climate change would also disappear. WRONG, for two reasons. One reason is that the US accounts for only 13 % of total global CO2 emissions, https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-global-co2-emissions-will-reach-new-high-in-2024-despite-slower-growth/. So, even if the US were to get to net zero quickly, global emissions will continue to grow.
But the other, even more important reason, as Gore should know, is that those disasters are a consequence of CO2 already in the atmosphere that will stay there, unless removed or counteracted, for potentially hundreds of years, if not much longer! https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-do-we-know-how-long-carbon-dioxide-remains-atmosphere. In other words, even if the entire world moved to net zero quickly, which of course is a fantasy, we’d still be stuck with climate change-related catastrophes (CATs) that will continue to occur. To be sure, reducing the growth of emissions, and getting to net zero, will keep things from getting worse, and potentially much worse. But it won’t stop the kinds of climate-related CATS we’ve unfortunately been experiencing and will continue to experience.
As you can tell, the exclusive focus on reducing CO2 emissions as “the solution” to climate change really drives me crazy, and it should do the same thing to everyone else who is interested in reducing the consequences of climate change. To imply otherwise, or simply to ignore this fact, is to invite another backlash against any policies introduced or reintroduced to slow emissions growth.
I know I’ve made these points before in previous posts, most recently after the LA fires: https://robertlitan.substack.com/p/after-the-la-fires. (the “LA Fire” post). But I will continue writing about them as long as the discourse around climate change doesn’t begin to honestly focus on our predicament and the limits of emissions reduction.
Gore is Right that Direct Carbon Capture Won’t Save Us (though its not a “Fraud)
I used to think that more R&D and then rapid deployment of direct carbon capture, either from the air or oceans, could reduce the 420 ppm CO2 concentration level to more acceptable levels, and thus be the world’s salvation. After all, it only seems logical that if the high ambient concentration of CO2 is the culprit behind the bad stuff happening (which of course is the case), then seemingly, the sensible thing to do is to reduce the $600/ton cost of sucking C02 out of the air down to more acceptable levels, say to $100/ton or ideally less, and then deploy direct carbon capture technologies with various kinds of incentives as rapidly as possible.
But when I did the math in my LA Fire post, I got a rude shock. Back in January, I estimated it would cost $40 trillion, even assuming the cost of direct carbon capture could be brought down from its current $600/ton to $100/ton. That’s like 40% of the world’s current GDP. Turns out the cost is even higher, closer to $54 trillion, as PerplexityAI calculated for me this week, as I was preparing this post. And the cost of removing the roughly 40 billion tons of CO2 that will continue to be emitted annually throughout the world for the foreseeable future, at $100/ton, would add another $4 trillion per year to the cost of carbon removal. In short, while more government-R&D for direct air/ocean CO2 capture is important because direct CO2 capture may someday play a useful role in mitigating climate change, carbon capture is not a panacea (although stating it to be a fraud, as Gore suggests, is too strong).
Now What?
So where does that leave us? Well, we can’t really roll back ambient CO2 concentration back to 350 ppm – to make the world safe again – but we can do the equivalent by offsetting the consequences of being at 420 ppm. And the only way to do it is through some form of geo-engineering: spraying particles into the upper atmosphere (most likely sulfur, but possibly salt crystals) to deflect sunlight so as to cool the earth in a way that offsets the heat trapped by the greenhouse effect created by too much CO2 in the atmosphere. I have written about geo-engineering ad nauseum, most recently in my LA Fire substack post, where I think I fairly laid out the pros and cons. All I can add here is that as severe weather events mount up, with more flooding around the country and hurricanes yet to come this season, eventually some serious minds, including some bold political leaders, are going to say: enough! It’s time we begin experimenting with geo-engineering, at least in pilot projects, as scientists in the UK did this spring, to see if there are ways to minimize the side effects, such as ocean acidification, which are very real. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/22/uk-scientists-outdoor-geoengineering-experiments. Such real-world experiments are needed because computer simulations can only teach us so much. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2025/apr/geoengineering-technique-could-cool-planet-using-existing-aircraft.
To be sure, there will always be conspiracy theorists (apart from many climate activists) who hate geoengineering, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has blamed the Texas floods on cloud seeding, and who plans to hold hearings on the subject, with the aim of banning any form of geoengineering. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/marjorie-taylor-greene-plans-hearing-on-geoengineering-amid-cloud-seeding/. But as crazy as she is, perhaps her hearings will help bring honest discussion of geo-engineering out into full public view, away from MJT’s show trial antics, so the public can begin to realize that geo-engineering is not a crackpot idea and that the sooner the scientific community is given the resources it needs to research the idea further, the better (I know that’s hopeless in this Administration, but there will be opportunities in 2029, when of course, the climate problem will be even worse).
In the meantime, which could be a very long time since even I do not expect under the best of circumstances to see geoengineering deployed at scale any time soon, there is only one other way to deal with climate change, and that is to do a far better job adapting to it. Adaptation is not giving up. Rather, it is accepting a fact of life, that deadly and hugely costly severe weather events will continue to occur, but that we humans can minimize their consequences through a series of common sense actions taken by governments, at all levels. Ideally, the federal government would take the lead, since although severe weather events are localized, there are so many of them that affect the entire country, that a national adaptation strategy is called for. That’s not going to happen, of course, in this Administration that is busy removing any reference to climate change on government websites.
Fortunately, some serious thinking and planning has gone into adaptation. In September 2022, the Biden Administration rolled out a “National Climate Resilience Framework,” https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/National-Climate-Resilience-Framework-FINAL.pdf, that charged every federal agency to develop its own adaptation plan, noting that more than $50 billion of the monies authorized in the Inflation Reduction Act were dedicated to “advance climate resilience strategies in every community in America now.” The Framework claimed that because of the IRA “roads and bridges are being elevated above projected flood zones; the grid is being made cleaner, more flexible, and more reliable; coastal ecosystems are being restored to buffer the impacts of hurricanes; Federal firefighters are getting a boost in pay; housing and buildings are being constructed and retrofitted to better withstand extreme weather; and public lands, forests, and waters are being managed to mitigate and withstand wildfires and droughts. These Federal investments have also emboldened the private sector to mobilize capital and investments in innovation.” The Framework made clear that adaptation was and is primarily a matter for state and local governments, which are nearest to the potential disasters, and know best what to do, but federal support of these efforts was and remains essential.
So the question is, how much of this Framework, which is chock of full of detailed initiatives discussed over 30 single-spaced pages, has been implemented? The best I could determine, using Perplexity (which I consider to be among the best of the AI tools), is that only about $3 billion of the $50 billion authorized has actually been spent. You may ask, why hasn’t more been done? Readers probably know the answer. Here’s Perplexity again, based on trustworthy sources (I checked):
“The Trump administration has significantly slowed and, in many cases, halted the implementation of the Climate Resilience Plan. This has been accomplished through executive orders, funding cancellations, agency restructuring, and a broad rollback of federal climate adaptation and mitigation measures. Many projects and initiatives that were underway have been paused, defunded, or canceled, particularly those targeting vulnerable communities and long-term resilience.”
OK, so the federal government, not surprisingly, is way behind the curve on helping to make our economy and society more resilient to climate change. How much, realistically, should we be talking about? I haven’t done the in-depth cost-benefit analysis that would be required to answer that question, but here are some data points to give you an idea of the scale of what’s likely to be needed:
--States already “face an estimated backlog of nearly $1 trillion for deferred maintenance and needed upgrades to public infrastructure” in order to “finance long-overdue repairs and ensure that America’s roads, bridges, and water systems can withstand future climate impacts.” https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2024/11/21/states-are-exploring-paths-to-finance-climate-resilient-infrastructure.
--One well-known wealth adviser has projected that the “total addressable market” (TAM) in developed economies (including the US) for climate resilience in just three areas -- water-supply infrastructure, flood defenses, and wildfire suppression alone -- ranges from $200 billion to $300 billion per year. https://www.wellington.com/en-us/institutional/insights/climate-adaptation-may-cost-trillions.
To be clear, not all climate adaptation spending must be made by governments. Firms in the private sector have been making, and will continue to make, investments to protect their own infrastructures, including data systems, from climate-related severe weather events. I haven’t seen, however, and I don’t think it exists, a reliable estimate of how much in the aggregate US private firms are spending on adaptation. But however much it is, private firms cannot be expected to and don’t take account of the society-wide costs of not adapting to climate change in a cost-effective way. At the end of the day, adaptation must be heavily led and financed collectively, which means by governments.
If I had a magic wand that really worked, I would want the next administration to develop and actually implement a federally-led, but locally implemented, severe weather adaptation plan. And responsibility for doing it can’t be split among 20 different agencies. That responsibility must be lodged in a centralized office, reporting directly to the President. Until this happens, all of us will be sitting ducks for future weather catastrophes, no matter how rich we are. Like it or not, we’re in this same boat together. What happened in Texas over July 4th, and what is continuing to happen around the country, exposes every one of us to the ravages of climate change already baked in. And it won’t matter whether you live in a red state or blue state, or what party you identify with.
Before I leave the subject of adaptation, please indulge this (first) fantasy. With hurricane season likely to unleash its full fury between now and September 30th, when the current federal fiscal year ends and Congress is supposed to complete its appropriations bills, millions more Americans are likely to be the victims of severe weather, with inadequate or even no help from FEMA. Against that background, suppose that this fall Ds in Congress try to peel off enough Republicans in each chamber to withstand a Presidential veto, with the following appropriations plan: freeze the portion of the $170 billion Congress just authorized for immigration control that funds only the huge expansion of the ICE police force for mass deportations (allowing the monies for the construction of the southern border wall to remain). Trump’s mass deportations are not only cruel, but also are already deeply unpopular in the country and will grow more so over the coming weeks. The plan I have in mind would devote that money instead to disaster relief and to weather adaptation (as a means of reducing future disaster relief spending). Examples include restoring funding cuts for NOAA and new monies for community weather adaptation plans (with a promise to study and then vote for a lot more next Congress). I know getting Rs on board with such an idea now seems like a fantasy, but the closer we get to the mid-terms, the more worried many Rs in both Congressional chambers have to be for their own political futures from the destruction of their local communities that the deportations and severe weather will be wreaking. President Trump may be able to shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue in New York and survive politically, but he may not able to survive the political damage from the more damage he causes to his own voters (along with the rest of us). Then, at least in this fantasy (which may have a 1% chance of actually happening), enough Rs would side with Ds to adopt something like this plan. (I was tempted to continue my fantasy by saying that if enough Rs won’t go along, then the Ds should threaten to shut down the government if they don’t get the kind of appropriations tradeoff I just outlined. But the reason I’m not suggesting that course of action, even in my fantasy, is that Trump would welcome a shutdown, while declaring ICE enforcement personnel to be “essential workers,” and most likely paying them anyhow, even without Congressionally appropriated funds).
A Reset On CO2 Emissions Control
I return now to the subject of CO2 emissions. As I noted earlier, the only reason to focus on reducing CO2 emissions is to keep weather CATs from getting worse, more numerous and more dangerous. In the future, if Democrats ever return to power, they’ll need to tell the American people this simple truth and not give the impression that an even faster transition away from fossil fuels will make these CATS go away.
But Ds will also have an opportunity in 2029 to do a reset on emissions reduction itself. By that time, government regulations to curtail COS emissions will have been repealed and/or not enforced. The subsidies for clean energy will be gone. On assuming office in 2021, President Biden and his advisers rejected the standard economic advice of economists across the political spectrum: that the growth of CO2 emissions is most efficiently curtailed by a carbon tax (assessed when fossil fuels enter the supply chain, namely at refineries, import terminals, or processing plants). If set at a level to equal the “social cost of carbon” (or “SCC”), or the damage to society caused by an extra ton of CO2 emitted, the tax would ensure that the prices of all products causing CO2 emissions, directly or indirectly through the inputs they use, would fully reflect their costs to society. The Obama administration set the SCC at $43/ton, but by 2023, the Biden Administration had raised that figure to $190/ton, equivalent to about $1.70 per gallon of gasoline (at the lower SCC of $43/ton, the per gallon cost would be around 40 cents).
Fearing the political consequences of raising the cost of gas, and other products with fossil fuel inputs, by even one penny, the Biden Administration decided on a different approach to slowing the growth of CO2 emissions: subsidize different renewables, EVs, and carbon capture, while tightening regulations of utilities and other emitters of CO2. Sugar (in the case of the subsidies) rather than vinegar (the carbon tax). The carbon tax, as an economic matter, is clearly superior to the subsidy/regulatory approach, because pricing carbon right doesn’t pick specific energy sources to support, which is inefficient, and also avoids underpricing the use of energy, which offsets some of the emissions-reducing effect of the subsidies. But the Biden political team believed that the subsidy/regulatory approach (voters don’t directly see the cost of regulations) was the better political way to go. So the carbon tax approach was rejected in favor of subsidies/regulation.
But with Trump creating a blank slate on CO2 emissions policy, the economists in 2029 will have new, powerful arguments in favor of the carbon tax approach. Not only is a carbon tax more efficient, for the reasons just given, but it could avoid the headache of reinstating the complicated regulatory apparatus to curtail CO2 emissions, including the risks of having any new regulations neutered by the courts. Moreover, by the calculations I get from AI, a carbon tax even at the lower Obama $43/ton level for the SCC would generate additional federal receipts of $215 billion a year; likely a bit less, call it $200 billion, taking account of behavioral responses to the tax. If, say, $50 billion of that amount were rebated to low and moderate income households through the income tax system, in order to offset the higher cost of gas, the federal government still would earn $150 billion annually, or $1.5 trillion over decade – enough to wipe nearly half of the addition to the deficit caused by the OBBB. Moreover, Trump has demonstrated his willingness to use tariffs to raise the prices of virtually everything in the economy, without tax offsets for low and moderate income voters. If he can do that for economically destructive policies that will not materially enlarge manufacturing employment and may actually reduce it (once full account is taken of the higher input costs US producers will bear because of the tariffs), https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/trump-tariffs-trade-war/, then why is it so politically impossible to impose a carbon tax at say the Obama SCC level, as part of an overall deficit reduction package, that would at least accomplish something useful?
Climate (and Budget) Education (they’re related): The Buck Stops in the Oval Office
The politics of all this, of course, depend on educating the public. So let me close with another fantasy and then a very real-world suggestion. First, the fantasy (updated to take account of considerable worsening of our fiscal situation since I started having this fantasy): I have long wanted a President to address the American people from the Oval Office with one or two very simple charts, depicting our nation’s finances and the need to get them in order: charts showing over time, the shares of federal spending and tax revenue, as a percent of GDP, which now (post OBBB) would a yawning gap between the two lines, namely deficits of 6+% of GDP, the highest peacetime level in our nation’s history. Another chart would show that the federal government now spends more servicing the interest on the debt than we spend on national defense, and just about the same as we spend on Medicare! The President would then say that our annual deficits are so large that if we don’t rein them in at least somewhat, the risk grows over time that one day our lenders, both Americans and foreign buyers, will demand much higher interest rates, throwing us into a deep recession, which necessary belt-tightening would only aggravate. The Fed, he/she would note, could mitigate these outcomes, but only by printing more money – in effect, “monetizing the debt” – which would lay the foundation for much worse inflation later. In other words, on our current course, we run the risk of facing the kinds of dilemmas and economic pain that countries like Greece and Argentina have recently suffered through.
Continuing the fantasy address, the President could then tell the public the good news: that we don’t have to eliminate that 6% of GDP annual deficit, which itself would trigger a recession, but instead just bring it down to a more sustainable level, one that would keep the ratio of our total federal debt to GDP constant (at this writing, if we don’t do that, our federal debt to GDP ratio is headed from around 100 percent today to 127 percent by 2034, even higher than after World War II, and of course to much higher ratios in the future after 2034). Writing in the Wall Street Journal this past week, Bill Galston of Brookings explains we can stabilize the debt-to-GDP ratio by cutting the deficit-to-GDP by just another 2 percentage points (not the full 6+ we are running now). I just showed how implementing a carbon tax of $43/ton would shave about 0.5% of GDP off the deficit annually. We could also make Medicare premiums even more progressive (to help keep that program from becoming insolvent in 2033), make some intelligent cuts (not through an unguided chainsaw) in spending (starting with rolling back the crazy amount of money going to ICE for mass deportations), eliminate the income cap on the social security tax (to keep Social Security from going insolvent in 2033), and modestly increase tax rates for those making more than $500,000, and that should just about do it, maybe with a little room to spare, which will be needed to beef up our military, especially stockpiles of drones and other hardware to deter the growing military threat from China.
You might say at this point, tons of economists have been warning of the dangers of growing deficits for years, especially right before Congress enacted OBBB. And there is a terrific organization doing great work educating the public about the federal budget, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, https://www.crfb.org/, that has been issuing deficit warnings since it was formed (I’m proud to say that it’s headed by my former RA at Brookings, Maya MacGuineas). But we’ve never had a president lay it all out this way, in simple charts before! Never. Isn’t it about time?
Now, let’s update this fantasy to account for climate change, another long-running problem where through a few charts the President also could set the record straight. He/she would start by showing this chart depicting the growth of CO2 emissions over time: https://gml.noaa.gov/webdata/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo.pdf. Then he would show a chart depicting over time the increase in the number of days of “extreme heat” each year – to draw the connection between CO2 and the warming of the planet. Then show the consequences, a chart depicting over time the mounting costs of severe weather events. And he would then tell people what I have just written in this post. That we’re at 420 ppm, well beyond the “safe” 350 ppm and that there is nothing other than geo-engineering that will get us back to the equivalent of being at 350 ppm. That all the emissions reduction in the world won’t change that fact. That adaptation therefore is a must. And that a carbon tax, as part of a larger deficit-reduction plan, is the most efficient way to keep things from getting worse.
Calling Steve Ballmer
Now to answer the question you may have had when reading the subtitle: Why did I mention Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft, now owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, and the founder and main talking head at USAFacts.org.?
Well, as a run-up to the answer, I will note that I could give another TED talk laying out the charts just described (though I’d need a really good research assistant to make the charts). I actually gave a TED talk in 2015 about the importance of economists to businesses, and it has racked up over 500,000 views:
Which is pretty good. But I’m not a household name.
There are plenty of politicians who, if they had the guts, could give such a talk too, but it’s not the same as a President doing it. Plus, viewers would naturally ask: if you know all this, why haven’t you done anything about it?
We need a respected non-politician to do this. Someone who’s known as a “just the facts” guy. And that, my friends, brings me to Steve Ballmer. Not only is he Mr. Facts, and would do a great job laying out in an engaging way that only he can do what I’ve just set forth, and perhaps more, but he is also immensely wealthy. He could tape an original Ted-length version of the talk, 18 minutes (for TED and for his own website), but with his access to the best TV talent, could do variations in 60 second and even 30 second commercial formats. The commercials would be non-partisan, but end with something simple, like: “Demand your representatives in Congress do something meaningful about these problems, without destroying our government and hurting the least fortunate among us. And if they won’t promise to push for a plausible plan for doing that, don’t vote for them.”
Ballmer has the money to plaster the airwaves with these ads in all states and districts in the mid-terms where they would matter. What’s good is that Ballmer loves his NBA team and has no political ambition. Exactly what’s called for.
He could start doing all this after Labor Day (no one pays attention during the summer) and keep it up through the mid-terms. And then, of course, do it again in the runup to 2028.
A well-financed educational campaign like this is the only thing I can think of that could meaningfully change our political conversation, compel politicians from both parties to face the music, and thus move the needle on both of the major issues of our time: curbing our growing deficits and doing something about climate change that really matters. We’re running out of time.