While we don't object to the "centrist" tag, we're not sure that it fully captures what is increasingly becoming a very multidimensional debate. Where the fault line in the climate debate has, for a number of years been defined by an anti-environmental right that has denied anthropogenic climate change and an environmental left that has advanced an agenda ostensibly based on the consensus among climate scientists that rapid climate change is occurring and is caused by human activities, that divide is now fracturing in a number of important ways.

As many on the right have accepted and embraced the reality that climate change is occurring and requires some kind of significant response, a debate about what constitutes an appropriate response, both in scale and in kind, has erupted. Whatever problems we and others may have with Al Gore, for this we can thank him. Acceptance of the scientific consensus among climate scientists that global warming is occurring, however, does not lead, as many environmental leaders have supposed, to consensus as to the appropriate response to the crisis.

Indeed, the view that there is "no center on global warming," as many responses to your post have asserted, reveals a highly reductive view, leftover from a decade of doing battle with global warming deniers, that there are only two real camps in the debate about what to do about climate change, those who deny that there is any problem at all, and those who accept the scientific consensus that global warming is occurring and therefore support some kind of regulation centered approach to address it. In this view, any one who questions the regulation centered approach to addressing global warming is either a global warming denier, a global warming delayer, or grossly misinformed.

But as you correctly observe in both your original post and several of your responses, the question now at hand is what will be necessary to reduce global carbon emissions by 80% over the next century. Do we have all the technology that we need or do we not? And what do we even mean when we say that? Can we achieve the necessary reductions in emissions by using energy more efficiently and downscaling our consumption and lifestyles or do we need a more fundamental and rapid transformation of the energy technologies that we rely upon? If the former approach is not sufficient, what will it take to drive a rapid, global transformation of the energy economy? Can that transformation be accomplished primarily through regulation and carbon pricing or will it require more direct interventions to accelerate innovation and adoption of clean energy technologies?

While the scientific consensus that climate change is occurring is clear, there is a good deal less certainty about what we should do to address it. Most now agree, across the political spectrum, that we should do "something," but what that something is varies wildly. Most economists agree, for instance, that we should establish a price for carbon, but what they think that price should be varies wildly. There is also great debate as to whether cap and trade approaches will be either effective or efficient mechanisms to establish a carbon price, whatever it may be.

Most energy scientists, similarly, agree that major breakthroughs in the cost and performance of clean energy technologies will be necessary to replace fossil fuel based energy sources on the scale necessary to achieve deep reductions in clean energy emissions, and most agree that carbon prices and regulations alone will not be sufficient to drive those breakthroughs, but also vary a great deal on the level of public investment necessary to achieve those breakthroughs, the technologies that should be prioritized, and the appropriate institutional arrangements to oversee those investments.

While the existence of these questions should not excuse us from taking action immediately to address the looming climate crisis, they do, in sum, raise serious questions about the efficacy of the command and control approaches to dealing with carbon pollution that have dominated both the Kyoto approach to global warming internationally and present proposals to reduce carbon emissions domestically.

The reality is that the climate sciences can not tell us precisely how much we must reduce carbon emissions in the atmosphere to avoid severe climate impacts nor can economic models, even the most sophisticated, tell us what is the optimal price for carbon. Past experiences capping and trading sulfur dioxide from a small number of coal fired power plants in the United States are not particularly useful guides for evaluating the efficacy of a global carbon trading system.

For these reasons, we have argued that the primary and most important benchmark for any framework to address global warming is how quickly it can succeed in radically driving down the cost, in real deployed terms, of clean energy technologies, such that they can quickly replace current dirty energy sources not only here in the United States but in China, India, and other developing economies, which are unlikely to agree to increase the cost of dirty energy sources for many decades to come. We have further argued that lacking major public investment for research, development, and early stage deployment of these clean energy technologies, private sector investment, driven by policies to price carbon emissions, will be insufficient to accomplish this objective, a view that is shared by most major reviews of the current state of clean energy technologies.

Those who have objected to this criticism of the current regulation centered approach either argue that cap and trade will drive sufficient private investment toward these technologies to quickly accomplish the objective of achieving dramatic breakthroughs in the cost and performance of clean energy technologies, that environmental organizations have in fact long advocated public investment in clean energy technology, or both. But, of course, you can't really have it both ways. If regulation centered approaches are capable of driving private investment sufficient to the task at hand then there is no need for large public investments. If public investment is indeed critical, then it ought to be pretty clearly reflected in the priorities of national environmental organizations in Washington rather than remaining the red-headed stepchild of global warming policy that it is today.

Anyone who doubts that serious public investment in clean energy technology remains a low priority for environmental groups should ask themselves the following questions: what is the position of a major environmental organization that you are either a part of or support on public investment? How much public investment annually is absolutely necessary? What technologies should that money be spent on? What are the goals of that program? How should those investments be insulated, if at all, from the annual congressional appropriations process? What agency or institutions should oversee those investments? I would venture that few, if any of those reading this blog could answer those questions off the top of their head with any specificity, or even find those answers easily.

By contrast, I would guess that many reading and posting here could tell you exactly what the positions and differences among national environmental organizations are as to the carbon caps they support, their position on trading emissions credits and offsets, and auctioning pollution permits, and their position on fuel economy standards, renewable portfolio standards, and other regulatory policies. So while many have suggested that our position on the central, critical, and large role of public investment in addressing the climate crisis is "not that different" from that of the national environmental lobby, we would suggest that whatever representatives from those organizations may say about their position, it is not a particularly high priority, as reflected by both the focus of the policies they advocate and their communication with the public.

Whether you call our position centrist, a third way, or just a different way, it is indeed different and it is neither a strategy for delay or denial. It rather reflects our own commitment to address the crisis as rapidly and comprehensively as possible. One may disagree with the approach and the argument but to suggest that is simultaneously indistinguishable from that of the environmental movement and a strategy for delay only reflects the confusion of traditional environmentalists at a moment when the debate to which they have become accustomed has shifted dramatically.