It is true that one of the unfortunate costs of the Obama administration’s ill-advised investments in Solyndra and other bad bets in their effort to pick winners in the market of energy technologies was an erosion of conservatives’ longstanding support for basic R&D. (ARPA-E is actually an outgrowth of a George W. Bush administration initiative to create “innovation hubs” at DOE.) But despite the backlash, the picture is not nearly what Chait paints: My organization works with conservatives on these issues and our experience is that there is an enormous appetite for these ideas—but the most frequent objection I hear is the widespread disbelief that liberals would ever accept them. Reading Chait, you can see why they feel that way.

If liberals want conservatives to join them in causes like climate change, they would be wise to spend some time thinking about whether there is anything that they can do to make the proposition more appealing. My organization favors funding for ARPA-E — but before we ask Americans to give the Department of Energy more money, let’s restructure it to make it an agency that’s capable of spending money effectively. Secretary Moniz has actually taken some steps in the right direction recently, which I applaud. Imagine what could be done if that work was actually the focus of the administration’s efforts rather than its quixotic charge at carbon regulations. The Department of Energy should be at the forefront of our climate response, not the Environmental Protection Agency — and Chait is wrong to think that we don’t need to recognize that.