As Hillary Clinton acknowledged in Melbourne this week, the Obama administration has abandoned its landmark legislation to combat man-made global warming.
Of course, the US failure to implement an emissions trading scheme, or a carbon price more generally, is hardly novel. Other nations, such as Canada and Australia, have also shelved cap-and-trade proposals.
What makes Washington's failure so much more significant is that without its leadership, the prospects for a legally binding, enforceable and verifiable new international agreement are virtually zero.
The cap-and-trade bill that narrowly passed the US House of Representatives in June 2009 had been stuck in legislative limbo for more than a year. But Senate Democrat leaders faced with near double-digit unemployment and skyrocketing national debt, recognised it represented political death for many colleagues.
Indeed many Democrats from midwest coal and manufacturing states ran specifically against cap-and-trade in last week's mid-term election. Take Joe Manchin: in one television commercial, the Senate candidate for West Virginia saved his campaign by literally shooting the bill with his hunting rifle.
As for the Republicans, only two out of the 48 primary candidates for Senate said they believed in manmade global warming during the recent campaign.
If Congress, with Democratic super-majorities, could not pass a climate bill so weak that it consisted of little but loopholes for the so called big polluters, the President has no chance of persuading a new group of more sceptical lawmakers riding an anti-tax wave to Capitol Hill.
To be sure, Barack Obama hopes to unveil other climate initiatives such as multimillion-dollar subsidies for renewable energy projects. But most green lobby groups concede that direct-action proposals are insufficient measures to combat global warming. Obama could use the US Environmental Protection Agency to override Congress and unilaterally impose regulations under the 1990 clean-air laws. But such action would be deeply unpopular in several bellwether, recession-plagued states in the lead up to the 2012 presidential election. In any case, administrative regulation would almost certainly be tied up in litigation for years.
Which brings us back to a global treaty to succeed the Kyoto protocol which expires in 2012. China, India and Brazil have made it clear they won't sign. In the European Union, an ETS has done to little to reduce emissions. And Canada is hitched to the US. Get ready for Cancun to be another Copenhagen.
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