The idea of a government-sponsored or international initiative to develop non-carbon energy sources, proposed last week by Hoffert et al. ( Nature 395, 881–884; 1998 ), should sound alarms in one respect, at least: results of previous energy technology drives have not always been encouraging. Governments invested billions of dollars in the research, development and demonstration of nuclear power in the 1950s and 1960s, but ultimately the technology failed as an economically competitive energy source when its full life-cycle costs were taken into account. In the United States twenty years ago, significant funds were directed at renewable energy by the Carter administration. Much effort was wasted on ‘demonstration projects’ that featured little genuine innovation. With these histories in mind, there is all the more onus on its proponents to show that the proposed energy R&D would work out diffferently.

A year ago, a panel of the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology, chaired by John Holdren of Harvard University, made the case for an expanded energy R&D programme. Their report prudently stressed the importance of a broad research portfolio. Holdren would not argue that his recommendations would greatly influence US energy use in the near term. Yet that is the claim that the Clinton administration is now making for the far smaller research package that it extracted from recent budget negotiations.

In fact, technology support, while important, is only one of the things that the United States should be doing to curtail its emissions. Encouraging energy efficiency is not rocket science. It merely requires a little political courage, which has not been forthcoming thus far from President Clinton. He has proposed, for example, a tax incentive to encourage people who buy big cars to buy big cars with better fuel economy instead. An incentive to encourage the purchase of small cars was rejected as too rude to Detroit, which can't produce small cars efficiently.

Clinton may be cautious, but his opponents in the Congress make him look like a reckless adventurer. For example, conservatives in the House of Representatives have been obstructing the introduction of federal standards for the efficiency of domestic appliances. They base their objection on the view that a federal government notice on a washing machine, announcing its average wattage, is one step too far down the slippery slope to state intervention in the lives of ordinary Americans. Perhaps its real basis is more to do with makers of inefficient washing machines, who find political contributions to be less financially exacting than modern industrial design.

Where the political will exists, significant emissions cuts can be made today, without recourse to exotic technology. In this regard, it is encouraging to note that Senator Connie Mack (Republican, Florida) is supporting a bipartisan measure that would prepare the ground for future tax credits for corporations that take action to reduce emissions now (see page 7). Mack is a staunchly conservative senator, but most of the people in his state live barely a few feet above sea level, and may be reluctant to participate in a lengthy experiment to establish whether political paralysis is an adequate response to the mounting scientific evidence for man-made climate change.

There is a role for government in supporting the scientific research needed to underpin a healthy, climate-neutral energy supply industry. It will then be largely up to that industry to implement the technologies that will cut carbon emissions, and it will only be tempted to do so when the right price and tax incentives exist. For now, when governments talk of research programmes to counteract climate change, there is a danger that they are placing a fig-leaf over their own failure to put such incentives in place.