On Thursday, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, abandoned the fight for meaningful energy and climate legislation. The Republicans  surprise  had been fiercely obstructionist. But the Democratic leaders let them get away with it, as did the White House. It has been weeks since President Obama spoke out about the need for a serious climate bill to address the very real danger of global warming and to lessen this country’s dependence on imported oil.

Last year, the House passed a decent if imperfect bill that would have placed economywide caps on greenhouse gas emissions. John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman offered an equivalent bill in the Senate. Mr. Reid counted noses and decided his best chance was with a stripped-down version that caps only emissions from power plants. Now even that bill has fallen by the wayside.

Mr. Reid’s latest version is not even a pale shadow of what is needed. It will include useful reforms related to the oil spill, and possibly some land conservation and energy efficiency provisions. But there is no cap of any sort. Without that, industry will have little incentive to reduce emissions or invest in cleaner energy sources or new technologies. The bill also fails to require utilities to derive a significant percentage of their power from renewable sources.

The Republicans obviously bear a good part of the responsibility for this failure. With a handful of exceptions, they have denied or played down the problem of global warming for years and did pretty much anything they could to protect industry from necessary regulation. There are, however, as many as a dozen Senate Democrats, mainly from the South, Appalachia and the Midwest, who share the blame.