The New York Times editorial board is calling on President Obama to forge ahead with a climate bill, despite the loss of the Democrats’ 60th Senate seat. According to conventional wisdom (and some pundits), the chances of Congress taking action on energy and climate this year are  ”somewhere between terrible and nil.” The editorial challenges Obama to “prove the conventional wisdom wrong by making a full-throated case for a climate bill in his State of the Union speech this week.”

(However, as previously noted by this blog, the Senate bill in its current form has far less federal investment in clean energy technology development and deployment than what many experts, and the White House, have called for.)

Some of the reasons Congressional action cannot wait? In addition to concerns about climate change (which only continue to mount in severity), the editorial cites issues of national competitiveness at stake:

• China is “moving aggressively to create jobs in the clean-energy industry. Beijing not only plans to generate 15 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, but hopes to become the world’s leading exporter of clean energy technologies. Five years ago, it had no presence at all in the wind manufacturing industry; today it has 70 manufacturers. It is rapidly becoming a world leader in solar power, with one-third of the world’s manufacturing capacity.”
• The U.S. faces a “question of credibility.” At COP15, the US pledged to “meet at least the House’s 17 percent target. Success in the Senate is essential to delivering on that pledge. Failure would undo many of the good things [Obama] achieved in Copenhagen, and it would give reluctant powers like China an excuse to duck their pledges.” [Not sure about this last sentence with regard to China, which agreed to a voluntary carbon intensity reduction unilaterally ... and they probably mean to keep it.]
• Finally, the editorial notes, “the ‘jobs argument’ should impress the Senate … The climate change bills pending in the Senate would not begin to bite for several years, when the recession should be over. The cost to households, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would be small. A good program would create more jobs than it cost.”

Unfortunately, things look a bit hazy, despite Harry Reid’s earlier announcement that the climate bill was on the agenda for March. The editorial worries that “many Democrats as well as Republicans seem willing to settle for what would be the third energy bill in five years—loans for nuclear power, mandates for renewable energy, new standards for energy efficiency. These are all useful steps. But the only sure way to unlock the  investments required to transform the way the country produces and delivers energy is to put a price on carbon.” (This presumably refers to investment from private capital markets and not government-sponsored programs or federal investment.)

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