I don’t think of myself as especially hard working. I started my career at
The New Yorker
as a young staff writer—and in those days in New York publishing
circles, the day began at ten a.m. That’s when the receptionist
arrived, the switchboard opened. As a result, twenty-five years later,
if I’m sitting at my computer by nine-thirty I still think to myself,
“I’m early!” (Not only that, but twenty-five years later every place
else I’ve ever lived still seems cheap by comparison.) Still, even with
that laggardly start, I’ve managed to get done most of what I set out
to do, and I’ve never spent a lot of time whining about how hard it all
is. If Americans are supposed to be good at anything, it’s hard work.

Which is why it’s so depressing to work on climate change. Year
after year, for more than two decades now, the hard work essentially
goes undone. Our political class holds conferences, takes testimony,
considers scientific reports, gathers in enormous international
conclaves like last year’s Copenhagen session— and from it all, nothing
happens. In this country, our twenty-year bipartisan record of doing
absolutely nothing at the national level is unblemished. In 1988,
running for his first term as president, the
old George Bush said, “I’m going to fight the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.” Good line.

This was all supposed to actually change when Barack Obama took
over, and indeed, he’s done more to fight climate change than all the
presidents before him combined. Also, I’ve drunk more beer than my
twelve-year-old niece. And anyway, before anything really big can
happen, it has to work its way through Congress, and right now the
signs are not especially good. In a fit of hard work, the House managed
to pass a giant pork-laden “cap-and-trade” bill last summer, only a few
months behind schedule. But then the bill headed to the Senate, where
it ended up circling the runway behind the health-care jumbo jet that
just refused to land. And now that, several decades late, the Senate
has finally done
something about health care, its members appear to be completely exhausted.

Here’s a Democrat, Claire McCaskill of Missouri: “After you do one
really, really big, really, really hard thing that makes everybody mad,
I don’t think anybody’s excited about doing another really, really big
thing that’s really, really hard that makes everybody mad. Climate fits
that category.”