The following is a guest post from Kevin Hsu and does not necessarily reflect the views of Teryn Norris or Americans for Energy Leadership

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 The New York Times editorial board is calling on President Obama to forge ahead with a climate bill.

Conventional wisdom says that Congressional action on climate appear slim, but NY Times editorial board calls on President Obama “to prove the conventional wisdom wrong by making a full-throated case for a climate bill in his State of the Union speech this week.”

Some of the reasons action cannot wait? In addition to climate change concerns (the severity of which continue to grow), there are issues of national competitiveness at stake:

For one, China “is moving aggressively to create jobs in the clean-energy industry. Beijing not only plans to generate 15 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, but hopes to become the world’s leading exporter of clean energy technologies. Five years ago, it had no presence at all in the wind manufacturing industry; today it has 70 manufacturers. It is rapidly becoming a world leader in solar power, with one-third of the world’s manufacturing capacity.”

There is also a “question of credibility.” Mr. Obama said in Copenhagen that “the United States would meet at least the House’s 17 percent target. Success in the Senate is essential to delivering on that pledge. Failure would undo many of the good things he achieved in Copenhagen, and it would give reluctant powers like China an excuse to duck their pledges.”

Finally, as the editorial notes, “the ‘jobs argument’ should impress the Senate. Yet many Democrats as well as Republicans seem willing to settle for what would be the third energy bill in five years — loans for nuclear power, mandates for renewable energy, new standards for energy efficiency. These are all useful steps. But the only sure way to unlock the investments required to transform the way the country produces and delivers energy is to put a price on carbon.

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In any case, I should point out the following line from the editorial: “The climate change bills pending in the Senate would not begin to bite for several years, when the recession should be over. The cost to households, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would be small. A good program would create more jobs than it cost.”