"but Gail the Actuary was there and said "a corollary of this is that there is no point in protecting the US oil and gas industry. We can just buy what we need elsewhere.""

You go, girl! I'm glad that sanity at least had a bit of a voice at this high-level meeting. But I can't see much chance of such an obvious policy to be implemented, given the huge influence the industry has on politicians (or should I say their ownership of nearly the whole political system?).

As for John W. Rowe's concern about increases in electricity costs, shouldn't all energy costs be going up? I thought the advantage of C&T was that it wouldn't raise rates, though. I have always been skeptical of this. This again leads me to think that a straight forward high tax that then could be redistributed especially to the those least able to pay would be preferable.

Rationing is what we really need. And what we really really need is a general understanding that rationing is necessary because we face something much more serious than WWII, the last time widespread rationing of various products was in place. This awareness would add a moral weight to the rationing, and make cheating morally reprehensible (like "war profiteering") rather than laudable, which all and any kind of profit seems to be these days, no matter how ill gotten or how harmful to the common good.

Gail -

That three -spigot/bathtub analogy is so obviously flawed that I don't know why this person Nordhaus hasn't been called to task on it. (Or has he?)

Going back to the analogy, it hardly matters how many spigots you have going in and coming out of the bathtub. What really matters is i) who controls the individual spigots, and ii) where and to whom the outlet spigots are connected. This geopolitical reality makes the water in the bathtub nowhere close to being perfectly fungible, particularly if certain outlet spigots go not to he who pays the best price but rather to he who has made a long-term bilateral security arrangement with the controller of that spigot and has thus effectively taken a certain amount of bathtub water off 'the market'.

A far better analogy would be a game of musical chairs, as 'the market' does not determine who gets a chair and who doesn't, Rather, that is determined by who is more ruthless, opportunistic, and aggressive.

This is why I tend to dislike analogies, as there is rarely a perfect one-to-one correspondence of the elements of the analogy with the reality it is supposed to describe. Analogies can often be a cover-up for sloppy thinking.