MIT’s most celebrated economist, the late Nobel Prize winner Paul Samuelson, believed so strongly in central economic planning that he kept predicting the GDP of the USSR would surpass that of the United States until nearly the eve of its collapse.

But hey, they didn’t have modern computer modeling. Move over GOSPLAN, this time for sure!

Saving the planet by rapidly decarbonizing everything will require a level of economic intervention – including the reallocation of capital, labor, and land – on a scale and with a vigor that dwarfs Holodomor. Making exactly all the right tradeoffs at precisely the right time is going to require SCIENCE!

That’s where the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change comes in. Thanks to their new System for the Triage of Risks from Environmental and Socio-Economic Stressors (STRESS), totally unbiased social-scientific answers for the most complex global technology policy questions can now be delivered at the push of a button.

How many dairy farms must be shut down to eliminate cow farts? Who must keep cooking over dung fires to avoid building more fossil fuel power plants? How can we confine people to 15-minute cities? What neighborhood should be subject to a rolling blackout next?

Don’t be a science denier. Prepare to be triaged.

Story suggested by MIT News