Mitt Romney is right ...

... or, at least, in this one case, he's on the right track. Although the editors at the journal Nature don't think so. In fact, they tear a strip off the guy in last week's editorial, and I'm not really sure why.

Here's the Romney quote that ignited Nature's ire:

"We spend $30 billion a year in the National Institutes of Health, and we lead the world in health-care products. In defence, we spend even more. We lead the world in defence products," he told the Detroit Economic Club on 14 January. "Why not also invest in energy and fuel technology right here in Michigan?"

As Nature notes, "these sentiments come straight from the songsheet of the American Physical Society and its allies, which have long been pursuing a more modest proposal to double the amount the federal government spends on research in the physical sciences and engineering." But instead of lauding the call for more spending on research, the editorial appears under this subhead: "Mitt Romney's pledge to plough $20 billion a year into energy research may signal an unseemly bidding war" and calls it "the mother of all panders."

Which it very well may be. But so what? Romney's call for a mere $20 billion on energy research represents a fraction of what we need to be spending if we have any hope to bring emerging technologies such as carbon capture and sequestration, efficient batteries and cheap fuels cells and other clean sources of electricity to market.

Late last year, for example, some three dozen big names in energy and climate research, including Nobel laureates in chemistry, economics, and medicine, wrote a letter to Congress calling for an even larger investment:

America should be ramping up to invest a minimum of $30 billion per year to develop, demonstrate, and stimulate the commercialization of a range of technologies and approaches that can provide affordable carbon-neutral energy and use that energy more wisely.

According to Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, the US only spends about $3 billion annually on clean energy research, down from almost three times that in 1980. They calculate that an investment of $300 billion would pay for itself in a decade. And they quote University of Berkeley's renewable energy guru Daniel Kammen's testimony to Congress last year:

Using emissions scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a previous framework for estimating the climate-related savings from energy R&D programs (Schock et al.., 1999), we calculate that U.S. energy R&D spending of $15 ;;;;; 30 billion/year would be sufficient to stabilize CO2 at double pre-industrial levels [550 ppm].

[One could argue that 550 ppm is too high and that we really need to try to keep things below 500, but there's plenty of room of argument, so let's leave it at that.]

So what's so wrong about Romney's pledge of $20 billion a year? Nature points out that Romney, in the same speech, called for lower, not higher, fuel efficiency standards from Detroit.

Notably, it was made as part of a speech outlining the fantasy that the US motor industry can bounce back from its current emaciated state. General Motors and Ford have had some three decades of notice from Toyota, Nissan and Honda that it is time to shape up, and have utterly squandered every opportunity to respond.

So Romney panders to his audience. That much we can agree on. And Romney is hardly a bastion of responsible environmental stewardship. But the Nature editorial doesn't provide any solid foundation for its fear that Romney's pledge will lead to a bidding war, but even it it did, would that be such a bad thing?

All the remaining Democratic presidential candidates have called for reducing our GHG emissions by 80 percent within 42 years. Such a plan would require only some 2 percent reduction each year. Would that be so hard by spending $30 billion each and every year? The first few years we might miss the goal unless we implement serious conservation measures. But by 2015 or so, that kind of spending will almost certainly have paid off in the form of increased efficiency in photovoltaics and maybe even some promising carbon capture technology, and we could easily catch up by 2025 to get back on track to make 80 percent by 2050.

So what's Nature's problem? All they can say is "It is almost inconceivable that Congress would deliver that kind of money." Well, it will be if everyone keeps saying it is. But consider that we spend about $5 billion a week on the war in Iraq. Deficit spending or no, methinks we can squeeze a few billion out the system for clean tech, if we really want to.