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Buffett: America needs a 'wartime' strategy for clean energy

Buffett & Munger2023-05-08video3:01Open original ↗

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SpeakersQuestioner1Warren1
Questionerwith more and more people focusing on environmental competition protection and the government supporting the new energy industry as well so what are your thoughts on the continued development of new energy
Warrenraised a question i want to just take an extra minute because it's so important and and i don't really know whether our form of government uh is ideal at all in terms of solving describe we have solved at one time in world war two we took a country that was semi limping along and we found ourselves in a world war and what we did in a world war is we brought a bunch of people to washington at a dollar a year you know whether it was sydney weinberg or goldman's actually you just name them and we gave them enormous power to reorient the resources of the united states to face the problem that they faced which was to create a war machine and what they did was they found henry kaiser you know and told him to build ships and they went to the foreign motor company and said you build tanks and some airplanes and they they reordered the industrial enterprise of the united states in a way that was unbelievable because they had the power of the federal government and they had the power of the federal government and they they had the ingenuity of american business and they had the facilities of american business and it led to a very successful outcome but can we do that in a peace time where you've got 50 50 states and you have to get them to cooperate and you don't have anyone that you can you can issue orders but you can't you can't designate where the capital goes at the other end and you know we try and do it with tax incentives and all that sort of thing but we haven't we haven't created the unity of purpose and the machinery that worked in world war two where essentially everybody felt their one job was to win the war and we figured out how to use our industrial capacity to in effect defeat the axis powers and uh how do you recreate that uh how do you recreate that uh with the present democratic system i'm not sure i know the answer but i sure know the problem but uh and i think that if you can think of a if you've got an emergency on your hand i mean you really need to re-engineer the energy energy energy energy energy energy energy energy energy energy energy energy system the united states