Michael Greenstone has the résumé of somebody who should be despondent over Washington’s failure to pass a climate bill. An environmental economist who worked in the Obama White House, he is now back to being an M.I.T. professor and also runs the Hamilton Project, the well-connected, Democratic-leaning research group.

But Mr. Greenstone is not despondent. He thinks the benefits of the bills that died in the Senate — which would have raised the cost of carbon emissions, through a system known as cap and trade — were sometimes exaggerated. Once the necessary compromises were made, the bills might not have raised the cost of carbon by much. And they obviously wouldn’t have done anything about fast-growing emissions in China and India.

“The first best hope was getting a world price for carbon, and that now looks remote in the coming years,” he says. “But there are ways in which the other options may be preferable to a price only in the U.S.”

To put it another way, the death of cap and trade doesn’t have to mean the death of climate policy. The alternative revolves around much more, and much better organized, financing for clean energy research. It’s an idea with a growing list of supporters, a list that even includes conservatives — most of whom opposed cap and trade.

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