Climate change in deep freeze

It's been a grim month in Washington for greens. Lawmakers appear to have finally given up on efforts to pass a climate change Bill. An emasculated energy Bill in the Senate has been stripped of price on carbon - whether through a cap and trade or an outright tax.

It's been a grim month in Washington for greens. Lawmakers appear to have finally given up on efforts to pass a climate change Bill. An emasculated energy Bill in the Senate has been stripped of price on carbon - whether through a cap and trade or an outright tax.

This is a serious and unexpected blow for environmentalists. Greens were jubilant after the election of Barack Obama, who promised to 'roll back' global warming at his inauguration. Even John McCain - Obama's Republican rival - wanted to limit emissions. Furthermore opinion polls suggested that American voters had finally come round to the idea that global warming was not a myth.

So what went wrong? The severity of the recession has perhaps been the main obstacle. Stubbornly high unemployment has shunted the remote issue of climate change right to the back of the line, after health care, financial reform and even immigration. With Republicans making ground ahead of the November elections for Congress, Obama too has been reluctant to put his foot down. Even BP's oil spill failed to revive public support for greener energy.

The public also got a convenient excuse to turn a blind eye when emails leaked from a British climate research facility suggested that some scientists withheld ambiguous data.

So climate change is essentially in deep freeze in DC. If a price on carbon can't get passed with a chunky Democratic majority in Congress and an enthusiastic president, then it is hard to see when it could pass. Worse, with the US unwilling to take action, the international momentum may well fade. When the world's second largest carbon emitter gives up on an emissions tax, it will be harder to convince other big polluters that there is much point in taking action. Most big US banks survived the 2008 financial crisis. But climate legislation, it seems, did not.