We believed Obama was going to tackle climate change. It isn't that easy

…Obama and his team built a compelling narrative in the campaign. There was so much bad news last year and so many intractable problems that everything was beginning to dovetail. A big story was coming together; all of our crises

The Democrats have already achieved an impressive and perhaps unlikely victory. It’s easy to forget in the noise. Climate change emerged as a national story this spring, when a powerful House of Representatives committee produced a “cap-and-trade” bill. The White House played a quieter role than many supporters envisioned, given the hoopla surrounding Obama’s advisory “dream team,” which includes former Environmental Protection Agency chief Carol Browner as climate tsar, Nobel laureate Steven Chu at the Department of Energy and Harvard global change expert John Holdren as chief science adviser.

One school argued that the White House so thoroughly trusted veteran Democrat Henry Waxman to lead the charge that they outsourced all the work to him. Another school sensed equivocation in a White House that didn’t want to waste precious political capital on a doomed climate bill. After all, climate change is easy to construe as a lose-lose proposition. As retired General Anthony C Zinni recently told the New York Times: “We will pay for this one way or another