White House Course Correction on Climate?

"Socialism collapsed because it did not allow the market to tell the economic truth. Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow the market to tell the ecological truth." --Øystein Dahle, former Vice President of Exxon for Norway and the North Sea.

Among those concerned about climate change, the President, from what I can discern, is not very popular. He's not meeting expectations. He is not speaking the ecological truth. In his public pronouncements, especially in his much awaited and much criticized speech on energy, Mr. Obama is accused of lacking leadership and vision. Both The Atlantic and The New York Times took aim at the President's leadership, or lack thereof, on the energy climate bill now sausaging its way through the Senate. Writes the Times: "Mr. Obama must stress, explicitly and emphatically, that a conventional energy bill will not do -- and that attaching real costs to older, dirtier fuels now dumped free of charge into the atmosphere is the surest way to persuade American industry to develop cleaner fuels." Failure to price Carbon, says the Atlantic, "is a recipe for toasting the planet." Indeed, climate change is an existential threat. If we don't rapidly transition out of a carbon intensive energy economy we all but guarantee a path toward the collapse of the biosphere that supports us.

One of the questions before us in the U.S. this hot summer is, as Sting says, "Is there a political solution to our troubled evolution?" Politics failed at the global level in Copenhagen last year. Will it do so at the national level this year? Is President Obama proving inadequate to the singular challenge of his presidency, indeed, to the greatest challenge of his generation? (Or, of any generation. Climate change is believed to have destroyed discreet civilizations, but never Civilization itself. That's ahistoric. There really is no comparison)

The question on my mind today is what is the role of the White House this year on climate?
The president has officially said that he will "find the votes" to get a comprehensive climate and energy bill through the Senate. But, today's addition of Climate Wire reports that there is no longer the momentum in the Senate for a price on carbon. This echoes reporting elsewhere. The fall back position, if that is indeed what it is, is to price carbon from a single sector, electric generation. David Roberts of Grist has a really good synopsis of why this could be seen as a desirable half-a-loaf position, if it were to be done right.

But, is that enough? And, should the President be publicly talking about climate change? Of climate, says Roberts, it has, from the White House's point of view, become that which must not be named. Should the White House be speaking "openly, frequently, and forcefully about the challenge of global warming," as one critic put it, or should the politics of the moment dictate another course? If so, what is that course?