John Holdren was Obama's science advisor. He fought a good fight and tried to convince the administration to aggressively move on global warming, but instead the decision was to focus on healthcare. Then the Tea Party and nothing could happen. Here's an interview with him on the current state of affairs.
snip
...
GAZETTE: It seemed like for many years the job was to convince people about the science of climate change. Are we at a point where that job has been mostly done, positions are more or less baked in on either side, and the question now is going to be decided at the ballot box?
HOLDREN: The polls now show that between 70 and 80 percent of the U.S. electorate is convinced about the realities of climate change. So, the challenge is not to persuade the last 20 or 30 percent. We don’t need them. Seventy or 80 percent support is more than we’ve had for almost any change in our political system over the life of the republic. What we need to do is to persuade those who are already convinced about the science to increase their sense of urgency, to decide that they need to work for and vote for candidates who understand this issue and are prepared to take serious action. Our problem now is that, although a high percentage of the American electorate understands that climate change is real and caused by humans, if you ask the same people, “What keeps you awake at night?” they’re worried about their jobs, getting their kids through college, their retirement, the health system, drugs, terrorism. Climate change tends to come in number eight or nine. But that’s progress. When I started talking to President [Barack] Obama about these matters in 2007, the percentage who believed in the reality of human-caused climate change was between 60 and 65 percent. And the priority ranking was 18 or 19.
GAZETTE: Did the climate protests last week — the fact that they were global in scope and youth-driven — move the needle a little bit?
HOLDREN: Absolutely. In my view, most of the major sociopolitical changes that have occurred in this country and elsewhere — Civil Rights, improving the status of women, and many others — have resulted from a combination of what you might call bottom-up and top-down influences. Consider how the Vietnam War ended. It ended because of the interaction of defections at the top — people like Daniel Ellsberg [who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971] on the inside, saying, “Wait a minute, the emperor has no clothes” — and the bottom-up withdrawal of public support that occurred after virtually every American had either a family member or a friend who had been killed or injured in Vietnam, and nobody could really explain why. I think we’re seeing that with climate change: from the top, with reports like those of the IPCC and the U.S. National Climate Assessment, which comes out roughly every four years, on the impacts of climate change on the United States. The last one was released on the day after Thanksgiving last year — Black Friday — and in spite of that it got big coverage in the mainstream media outlets. That in itself was a sign of positive change in concern about this issue.
...