Someone please tell Paul Krugman about the energy quest

I like Paul Krugman. I realize that quality alone does not make me a very unique progressive. I have always relied on and been fascinated by his lessons on liberal economics (book: The Conscience of a Liberal) and went directly to him for health care analysis over the past 14 months. And I am certainly a fan of how, now that health care is over (for the time being), he seems to be directing his attention to climate change. The addition of such a popular and influential liberal voice - Nobel prize winner, New York Times columnist, brilliant writer - is encouraging in the debate over climate and energy policy.

But he has some catching up to do.

Yesterday many of us read Krugman's exhaustive piece, "Building a Green Economy," on climate economics for The New York Times Magazine. In it, he correctly diagnoses the carbon pollution problem as a Pigouvian effluence, and he speaks eloquently about the role governments can play in mitigating market uncertainty with effective and clear policies. He spells out the traditional debate over a carbon tax or cap-and-trade scheme, and comes down on the side of quick, aggressive government action as opposed to a "ramp-up" strategy. To skeptics he offers "the non-negligible possibility of disaster" and notes the successful precedent of the sulfur dioxide cap™ program. These are all fairly astute observations for anyone outside the environmental economics field; to those within, they are classics. But again, it is good to have Mr. Krugman on our side.

However, Krugman's prescription for fixing the pollution problem falls far short of what I, and others, consider sufficient. He overestimates the efficacy of the Waxman-Markey bill that passed the House last summer, and he overemphasizes the relatively minor mechanism of cap™ in any climate/energy bill. While I fully support a price on carbon, whether by carbon tax or cap-and-trade, I recognize that at some point such a policy simply acts to punish consumers for being involuntary members in the ubiquitous carbon economy they were born into. Over at his blog, Roger Pielke Jr. takes Mr. Krugman to task far more scathingly than I have:

Absent from Krugman's discussion is any discussion of energy technology (other than to disparage it) in favor of an almost mystical confidence in the magical effectiveness of the market to lead to conservation. Guess what? We cannot decarbonize the U.S. economy based on "conservation." To suggest otherwise is a pretty clear sign that one really doesn't understand the nature of the challenge.

The replacement of the carbon economy with the clean energy economy will take more than emissions reductions - it will require the unbridled innovation and research that earned us the space program, the Internet and the personal computer. Mr. Krugman offers the world to choose between a minor economic deceleration and climate catastrophe. What we should be choosing is between carbon and clean tech; between old technology and new prosperity; between economic wardship for the United States or technological competitiveness with emerging economies. That is how we must frame the question - not as a lesser of two evils, but as a quest for better, cheaper, more abundant and cleaner energy technology.

As it turns out, someone else at the New York Times is fully aware of this. In his blog Dot Earth, Andy Revkin's recent post "On the Energy Gap and Climate Crisis" puts together a much more comprehensive and effective narrative for our energy problems:

...if I had to choose one of two bumper stickers for our car - climate crisis or energy quest - I'd choose the latter. This doesn't mean I reject the idea that we face a climate crisis. I just don't think that phrase is a productive way to frame the challenge, particularly as defined over the last few years in the heated policy debate.

Paul Krugman, and many others, could benefit from Mr. Revkin's analysis. We cannot scare ourselves into solving the climate crisis, but we can rise to the challenge of constructing a clean energy economy - a possible future that will strengthen our energy security, mitigate energy poverty, increase consumer choice, decentralize our power production, and clean up our environment, both terrestrial and atmospheric. There is a bright future on the horizon, and the path to that future is our energy quest.