IF ONLY BILL ROTH HAD WON:

"It is not a new story, however. I was first elected to the United States Senate in 1972. That same year, an international think tank published The Limits to Growth, a report that claimed humanity was headed toward environmental catastrophe and economic collapse: Too many people were consuming too much of our planet. As the authors of the best-selling report wrote back then, "Taking no action to solve these problems is equivalent to taking strong action. Every day of continued exponential growth brings the world system closer to the ultimate limits of that growth. A decision to do nothing is a decision to increase the risk of collapse." And by the way, climate change back then wasn't even on the agenda.

"The world has not collapsed, you might have noticed. It's richer than it was 50 years ago. There are fewer people in extreme poverty, and fewer people suffering extreme hunger. And, more to the point, there is no evidence that we are running out of Earth through resource depletion. That said, climate change is definitely on the agenda. Taking no action to tackle this problem is, indeed, the 'equivalent of taking strong action' of the worst sort. That part the think tank got right.

"But economic growth, driven by the wonders of modern technological progress, isn't the problem here -- it's the solution. And that's because, fundamentally, we really don't have a climate 'emergency' or even a climate 'challenge.'

"What we have is a massive clean-energy problem, one that predates the recent energy shock caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And this problem has two aspects. First, as the Our World in Data organization puts it, 'The world lacks safe, low-carbon, and cheap large-scale energy alternatives to fossil fuels. Second, hundreds of millions of people lack access to sufficient energy entirely, with terrible consequences to themselves and the environment.'

"If a richer and more technologically capable world were to generate abundant, carbon-free energy, we could begin to tell ourselves a different story. This would be a story not just about a cooler climate, but about a more prosperous humanity with more opportunity-filled lives.

"Imagine a world with substantially less poverty, such that a country like Ethiopia became as rich as Denmark. Such a transformation would require a global economy at least five times as big as today, the folks at OWID say. Imagine a world where we could totally electrify the global economy, inexpensively desalinate seawater, power megamachines to pull carbon from the sky and reverse climate change, and do a whole host of things that our brilliant entrepreneurs and technologists haven't even thought of yet.

"All that's going to require a lot more low-carbon and carbon-free energy. And a lot more innovation. So here's what I'm proposing ..."

Well, regular Faster, Please! readers know the rest: a carbon tax that at least in part replaces the corporate income tax; revisiting 1970s-era environmental regulations that make it hard to build new clean energy sources and infrastructure; modernizing current regulations, especially those affecting the licensing of new nuclear fission technology and the permitting of geothermal sites; greater federal R&D for emerging energy technologies such as fusion and advanced geothermal, as well as climate engineering -- all of it part of a concerted effort to generate abundant clean energy ASAP. There is no other realistic path toward a more settled climate and greater global wealth.

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