Don’t grieve the Boxer-Lieberman-Warner climate bill, urges Joseph Romm in a Nature Reports Climate Change Commentary this week. Romm, voice of the Climate Progress blog, writes:

Although hailed as landmark legislation, the proposal, which died after it failed to muster close to the required 60 votes [in the US Senate], would not have put the nation on the path required to help avert catastrophic climate change.

The bill, like most climate plans now up for serious debate around the world, relied heavily on imposing a financial penalty for carbon emissions. But Europe’s up-and-running emissions market has done little to curb the continent’s appetite for carbon, and that should make legislators and negotiators queasy, argues Romm.

“The United States simply cannot wait another decade to find out whether domestic cap-and-trade legislation will drive carbon dioxide to a high enough price to curb emissions growth sharply,” he says. Nor is new technology the answer:

Such is the urgent need to reverse emissions trends by deploying a multitude of low-carbon technologies that we must rely on technologies that either are already commercial or will very shortly be so. Fortunately, venture capitalists and public companies have begun to inject many billions of dollars into the development and short-term commercialization of most plausible low-carbon technologies. Governments should now focus their R&D spending on a longer-term effort aimed at a new generation of technologies for the emissions reduction effort after 2040, but the notion that we need a Manhattan Project or Apollo programme for technology development is mistaken. Instead, what is urgently needed is an effort of that scale focused on the deployment of technology.

Romm said more about this Thursday in a cross-posted entry at Climate Progress and Grist, in the process resurrecting a set-to with Roger Pielke, Jr, on their respective blogs in April and May.

Romm at that time argued for the importance of carbon costs – though only as one prong on the pitchfork he was wielding against a Nature Commentary by Pielke and co-authors.

Meanwhile, the most recent opinion Pielke’s offered on our site is that the need for R&D isn’t up for debate anymore – it’s all about how to price carbon.

Anna Barnett