TAP talks to the author of a book about the climate war raging inside and outside the White House:
I expected that there would be a lot of battles in the climate war, but I didn’t expect to find one in the Obama administration, and I did. The conflict was between the green cabinet, people like Steven Chu, Carol Browner, and Lisa Jackson who wanted to push aggressively for climate action, and the political people like Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod who didn’t think the votes were there in the Senate and thought it was a losing proposition for the president. They carried the day for 18 months. They pushed only when their hand was forced by Henry Waxman and Nancy Pelosi, who took the climate bill to the House floor. At that point the White House did engage and help get it passed.