Adam, you ask N&S for clarity (sharpen their thinking). But who I ask, has all the answers and knows how the climate debate will play out? Their doubled-pronged strategy (regulation + investment) makes sense to me. I see no guarantee that cap-and-auction will work at all. But I see investment as essential.

Your "projections" of delaying action onto N&S seem unfair.

Here's a question: who actually cited numbers and statistics to back their argument, S&N or Roberts?  
The problem is that Roberts fails to explain, let alone even mention, how high carbon would have to be priced to actually achieve the kind of results he's talking about.  Facts please!

My thoughts exactly.  So exactly, in fact, that it's kind of eerie.  Although I don't know that they need to "sharpen their thinking on policy" so much as they need to be more attuned to how what they are saying is interpreted.

I read the essay in the same way that Adam did; having read N&S's response to NRDC, I see that what I heard initially was not what they intended.  Be that as it may -- and granted that it is hard to communicate subtleties of emphasis without getting totally didactic -- the thing that matters in these essays is not the message that was intended, but the message that was received.

This is just what over weight people are looking for.    Instead of talking about eating less and exercising more, we just have to talk about weight loss investments and breakthroughs.

Does that mean if I go to school, I don't have to study and pay attention, we can just talk about education investments?

How about Iraq?   We don't have to actually go door to door to rout out insurgents.   Just talk about national defense investments.  

The farther we get from actually doing the actual thing we need to be doing, the less effective we are.    

Reseach better renewables.  Yes.  Increase government spending on renewables from less than one billion to 10 billion a year.    Yes.   But the real work is to actually do the carbon release reductions.    How fuzzy we get about how we do that matters.

Adam,

There is a difference between finding our argument confusing and suggesting that it is confused. The former would suggest that the reader might bear at least some responsibility for not having understood the argument, the latter suggests that the argument just isn't right, doesn't make sense, or ignores some critical and relevant data or information.

Indeed, the fact that you and David Hawkins read our New Republic article and our subsequent posts here to suggest that we supported delaying action to address climate change or that we were "anti-regulation" might tell us as much about those who made those assumptions as it does about our argument.

Many environmentalists have long seen any suggestion that technology might be the answer to environmental problems as hostile because they have long seen technology, and economic development along with it, as the problem and cause of environmental problems. This hostility to technology long predates the dissembling of the Bush Administration and has long been a central feature of environmental ethics, going back well before Rachel Carson's jeremiad against modern agriculture in Silent Spring. One need only follow the many comments on grist mill in response to this argument to see that this is so.

As we argue in our book, to suggest that technology and economic development might be the answer to those problems runs headlong into the belief that limits, sacrifice, and fundamental changes to our lifestyles are what is required to address the crisis. Indeed this view long predates environmental concern over climate change. But notwithstanding the merits of downscaling ones material consumption and lifestyle in affluent nations such as the United States, doing so is simply not going to address the climate crisis. China, India, and the rest of the developing world are going to exponentially increase their energy use over the next 50 years whether we like it or not. Whatever it is that western environmentalists think they have learned about the false promise of materialism and consumption, the 5 billion humans on the planet who have not yet had the opportunity to avail themselves of prosperity and its comforts are not going to just skip it because we tell them to.

Sure, the Bush Administration and other opponents of action on global warming have long pointed out that the absence of low cost, low carbon technologies, and the unwillingness of China and India to limit their economic development in order to reduce their carbon emissions are profound challenges to current efforts to address global warming. And it is understandable that many environmentalists thereby assume that any suggestion that we need major advances in clean energy technology to address the crisis, and that we need to dramatically bring the cost of those technologies down so that they might be deployed quickly in places like China and India is an argument against action. But this only demonstrates that environmentalists are as locked into their thinking about global warming as are their opponents. The problem with the Bush Administration position is not that they have pointed out these challenges. They are the elephants in the global warming room that environmental advocates mostly prefer to ignore. The problem is that the Bush Administration isn't serious about addressing those challenges. When environmentalists deny them too, or suggest that acknowledging them is tantamount to opposing action to address global warming, one might reasonably wonder how serious environmentalists are about advancing real solutions rather than, say, a tidy political message.

So while we appreciate the advice, I'd suggest to you that the debate that we are having here, about what the climate crisis demands of us, what we can expect of regulatory solutions and what we can't, and what it will take to make the transition to the clean energy economy is precisely the discussion that we need to have.

Unlike entertainment markets, market pull for new energy technology responds to scarcity of old energy supply causing insecurity, and not so much on energy prices, including Dingel's carbon price.  

New technology will not stop coal soon enough.

The old ways will continue from the inertia of the old routines.   Our best chance is to get ahead of the curve, be bold, and shut down coal with regulation.  Then we can look to new technologies for displacing natural gas.  But, for the moment, shut down coal.  Any risk of failure to shut down coal is unacceptable.  Carbon taxes, caps and auctions, regulations, new alternate energy technologies, off-sets, and other not scalable ideas are negatives if they distract us from our primary mission.

Further, and this is important, subsidizing new energy technology manufacturing is not sustainable here or overseas.  Energy is too big, and consumes too much capital for market manipulation to succeed beyond the gee-whiz stage.  

We need well funded peer review to move forward, otherwise we are going to be up to our eyeballs in Ponzi schemes.

Over the past 30 years, China's mass development has brought more people out of poverty than any other development project in the history of the world.  Where did they get the majority of the energy for that development?  Coal.

It's not only unrealistic to imagine China limiting its coal development, it's socially unjust.  We should do all we can to get a moratorium on coal in the United States.  But don't expect China to do much about its coal-based emissions use unless we give them carbon capture & storage technology.  We can only do this once we make the right investments in CCS technology to bring down the price as quickly as possible.

Natural gas is cheaper than CCS.

We have the vision and economy to make the leap forward out of coal.  China will follow the evolution of low-carbon energy technology in a post coal world.  And China will export low-carbon technology.