Why the Climate Bill Died - Ecocentric - TIME.com

Conservatives—who generally believe that the only government action that can create jobs is a tax cut—were never really going to buy the argument that introducing a new level of government regulation would lead to net job creation.
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Just as Reid knew a carbon cap couldn't get the 60 votes now needed to get anything passed in the recalcitrant Senate, ultimately the threat of global warming didn't galvanize the public to the point where they would demand change. There are lots of reasons for this—disinformation campaigns by fossil fuel interests, the overblown controversy of "climategate," a media corps that too rarely puts global warming in the right context. But until that changes—and the public demands change—ambitious climate legislation will remain dead.

Op-Ed Columnist - The Right and the Climate [Hoax] - NYTimes.com

...conservatives who treat global warming as just another scare story are almost certainly mistaken.

Rising temperatures won’t “destroy” the planet, as fearmongers and celebrities like to say. But the evidence that carbon emissions are altering the planet’s ecology is too convincing to ignore. Conservatives who dismiss climate change as a hoax are making a spectacle of their ignorance.

But this doesn’t mean that we should mourn the death of cap-and-trade. It’s possible that the best thing to do about a warming earth — for now, at least — is relatively little.

The Dems’ Climate Change Fail | FrumForum

The sad reality is that neither the President nor the Majority Leader ever got behind any specific approach or piece of legislation.