Magical Thinking From the GOP

| Fri Jun. 11, 2010 12:21 PM EDT

Jon Chait rips into Lamar Alexander's Wall Street Journal op-ed about energy today, and I won't try to summarize it. Go read it and have a laugh. Still, I have to disagree with Jon. The best part of the op-ed is actually this sentence from bullet point #6:

Find a way for utilities to make money from the CO2 produced by their coal plants.

Shazam! There's just gotta be something we can do with all that CO2! I dunno. Freeze it and sell it to Spinal Tap for their live shows? Mount a campaign to increase soda sales a hundred million percent? Build a time machine and then hire some alchemists to figure out how to turn it into liquid gold?

Honest to God, where does this stuff come from? What's worst about it is that, relatively speaking, Alexander is one of the good guys. As Chait says, "He's one of the moderate Republicans! Most of them just deny the science of climate change altogether. The moderate position is that we can fix the problem via magic."