Winging It on Hot Air - Chris Horner - Planet Gore on National Review Online

My discussions (including conversations with someone who has been in meetings of most of the administration's climate principals) indicate that there is a general and pervasive cluelessness among Team Obama about how to impose the Kyoto agenda on you. That's a good thing. You just need to let your representatives in Washington know that there is no cheap virtue to be had in this issue, particularly in cutting deals to claim "I 'did something' " or "I cut a deal in order to avoid something much worse." Nonsense. Their fear over the politics of this has left them at sea.

One source confirmed the sense that, while the administration may like the idea of using EPA to serve as a foil for Congress — "we must act because otherwise, boy, EPA's gonna do horrible things!" — they have zero desire for EPA to follow through on this threat and actually try to impose CO2 regulations under the Clean Air Act as currently written, or to otherwise take ownership of this beast of an issue, the New BTU. It has to be Congress.
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So it does seem that both Congress and the administration desperately want to be begged (given cover) by industry to impose the Kyoto agenda, and they are not in agreement on any plan other than hoping that non-rent-seeking industry will be frightened into surrender. This means that it will be Democrats, not Republicans, who kill this (which should be obvious anyway, and just what happened with BTU in 1993); and the rent-seekers are not driving this even if they stopped squabbling over the loot and agreed on whose nest gets feathered by how much. It's the holdouts who need to be scared to their knees by EPA. That's what's going on.

Despite their fevered rhetoric, it seems fair to see both Congress and the administration like certain failed generals: convinced (or at least hopeful) that their opponent will sue for peace without having to fight, because they're not sure they can get their own guys out of the trench if it came to a battle. The last thing anyone should do right now is make their plight any easier.