Some have accused public-power advocates of taking advantage of the climate crisis to push an unrelated socialistic agenda. Why would state control over the means of production make the United States more likely to meet its emissions and adaptation goals than crafting a better market for the players we already have? Should the government, with little experience or organizational capacity, really take over EV production from the automakers, for example? Wouldn’t it be inefficient to hold a national referendum on what color trim options to offer on the state hatchback? There’s nothing obvious to gain by shutting down the private companies and rehiring everyone at USA Cars to do the same jobs, not from a climate perspective. If our central task as a society is to build three hundred million electric cars, then it’s probably best to get the autoworkers and automakers to do it. But who’s to say we need to build three hundred million electric cars? What if we need to build three hundred gigawatts of pumped-storage hydropower? When you look at the green transition from the perspective of grid-scale energy storage, it’s clear that, no matter how great the social need is, capitalists will simply decline to invest in certain kinds of projects, even with a reasonable expectation of long-term profit. And since no capitalist is ultimately responsible for society’s metabolism as a whole, there’s no guarantee that some decisive detail of decarbonization won’t drop between them like a fly ball in front of a lackadaisical Little League left fielder.