Andrew Revkin explained yesterday how he thinks the climate debate has become “a lot more complicated”. Revkin is now framing the serious part of the debate as a conflict between those who believe that capping greenhouse gas emissions will be good enough, and those who believe the solution lies, as Revkin puts it, in “radically advanced low-carbon technologies”. In this conversation, the lead voices ostensibly are, on the techno-fix side, Jeffrey Sachs from Columbia’s Earth Institute (one of my personal favorite entertainers — yes, I have a strange taste in entertainment) and on the emissions capping side, Joseph Romm from the Center for American Progress Action Fund. (Romm, incidentally, is a harsh critic of Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus, and Bjørn Lomborg.)

For the sake of convenience, I have tried to summarize Sachs’s argument as follows.

1. Premise 1: An attempt to restrain emissions “without a fundamentally new set of technologies” will stifle economic growth and “the development prospects for billions of people.”
2. Premise 2: A cap-and-trade system (like the one advocated by the Center for American Progress) or a carbon tax, cannot, by itself, reduce emissions.
3. Conclusion: Because of the high costs and negligible benefits of cap-and-trade, we need new technologies. In Sachs’s words: “By 2010 at the latest, the world should be breaking ground on demonstration CCS coal-fired plants in China, India, Europe and the U.S.; the wealthy nations should be helping to finance and build concentrated solar-thermal plants in states that border the Sahara; and highly subsidized plug-in hybrids should be rolling off the assembly line.”

Romm criticizes Sachs’s plan because Romm

1. thinks Sachs’s plan will take too long. (Romm wants to peak global fossil fuel use by 2020.)
2. thinks Sachs’s plan depends on the fallacious “breakthrough myth”: the idea that a small number of inventions can radically change energy use. (Pedantic editorial note: I would say that if Romm wanted to further strengthen this component of his critique, he might usefully draw from Paul Duguid’s critique of “technological determinism”, and perhaps even from Simon Jenkin’s critique of “neophilia”.)
3. thinks we already have the tools we need. Romm believes “we have now (or soon will have) the technologies needed to stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide levels at acceptable levels (below 450 ppm)”.

It is important to note that Romm, in his essay, agrees with Sachs when he says “we must spend a lot more money on R&D into new technologies” alongside a cap-and-trade plan. So presumably, Sachs’s call for “large-scale” public research, development, and demonstration funding and other technology-focused policies are not controversial to Romm, but Sachs’s dismissal of cap-and-trade is controversial. The important remaining question, I think, is, What are the costs, risks, and benefits of the American Progress cap-and-trade plan — upon which Romm is presumably depending?

As Romm lays out his blogging plan this week, I think it would be useful for Romm to focus on “Premise 1″ of Sachs’s argument: namely, that the costs of cap-and-trade are too high. My own, gut-level — and untested, albiet shared by some — suspicion is that while environmentalists have not always believed that cap-and-trade or similar emission reduction policies would deliver net benefits for economic growth, they discovered sometime during the past decade that touting the economic net benefits of cap-and-trade was the only way too make rhetorical and political progress. My private fear — though I am far from an expert on this matter — is that cap-and-trade would hurt the economy. (I am aware that the American Progress report attempts to argue otherwise.) Of course, it is necessary to carefully examine what that phrase, “hurt the economy”, actually means, especially in terms of the redistribution of wealth, but that would be the subject of another missive altogether.