Nobelist Krugman takes on the “fantasists” of the “burn-baby-burn crowd”

Nobel prize-winning NYT columnist Paul Krugman has been doing some terrific writing on the economics of climate action (see Climate action “now might actually help the economy recover from its current slump” by giving “businesses a reason to invest in new equipment and facilities” and “Krugman strongly endorses Waxman-Markey“).

Now he writes on Friday’s important CBO study, which found a “cost to households of Waxman-Markey in 2020 at $22 billion – which, given a projected population of 335 million, comes to 18 cents a day.  [We’ve been using the household figure of 48 cents a day.]  He ends his column titled, “Climate change fantasies“:

The point is that we need to be clear about who are the realists and who are the fantasists here. The realists are actually the climate activists, who understand that if you give people in a market economy the right incentives they will make big changes in their energy use and environmental impact. The fantasists are the burn-baby-burn crowd who hate the idea of using government for good, and therefore insist that doing the right thing is economically impossible.

From a fellow climate realist – Hear!  Hear!