But if that’s the main story, the back-story is more complex. Because it’s not just a straightforward combination of money, influence, and politics driving the Bush administration’s global-warming nonpolicy. The business interests may be paramount, but they’re not alone. Supporting them are a small but influential group of scientists, some who deny that human activities are contributing to global warming, others who go so far as to assert that global warming doesn’t even exist. Then there are the conservative media, pushing Bush back to the right every time he and his supporters even consider taking a pro-environment stance.

Bush’s father, of course, was a well-known squish — a conservative whose moderate tendencies made him ever suspect in the eyes of the hard right. So when George W. began his own presidential campaign, he was pressured to hew an orthodox line. As far back as July 1999, National Review Online noted approvingly that Bush, on his campaign Web site, had backed off from his earlier greenish musings: "[M]ost conservatives will be pleased to see that Bush’s statement that he believes global warming is real has morphed into ‘Recognizes that global warming must be taken seriously but will require any decisions to be based on sound science and a thorough cost-benefit analysis, opposes Kyoto protocol.’"

Throughout the campaign, Bush stuck with this pro-industry position. So, in a very real sense, the US’s failure to act last week was not merely an exercise in international hubris, but the fulfillment of a campaign promise as well.

After entering the White House, though, Bush gave his supporters a momentary reason to worry. Reacting to the unpopularity of his plans to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and his rejection of Bill Clinton’s policy to decrease acceptable levels of arsenic in drinking water, the Bush team decided to go green. Most of its strategy consisted of little more than photo ops. But the conservative press feared that Bush might actually decide to do something about greenhouse gases.

Leading the resulting charge was conservative columnist Robert Novak, who pushed the White House to back off a campaign pledge to regulate the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by power plants. In a March 1 column, Novak recounted an interview he had conducted on CNN’s Crossfire with Environmental Protection Agency administrator Christie Whitman. "George Bush was very clear during the course of the campaign that he believes in a multi-pollutant strategy, and that includes CO2," Whitman told Novak. "He has also been very clear that the science is good on global warming." Wrote an outraged Novak: "That would come as a surprise to voters, who heard Republicans upbraid Democratic candidate Gore all through 2000 for swallowing the scientific predicates of global warming."

The Bushies quickly reversed themselves, leaving Whitman hanging out to dry. But Novak kept up the drumbeat throughout March and April, issuing warnings every time a pro-Kyoto environmentalist was seen passing through the White House gates. Monica Lewinsky’s comings and goings were never watched as closely.

Meanwhile, Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot was singling out Treasury secretary Paul O’Neill for torture. Though O’Neill himself is a former captain of industry — he was the head of the aluminum company Alcoa, which is not quite the same as being the president of, say, the Sierra Club — he is sufficiently worried about the possibility that global warming is real to have drafted a three-page memo urging Bush to act on "global climate change." Big mistake. On March 16, Gigot wrote sneeringly that "Mr. O’Neill’s memo to the president reveals some of the traits that have made him an early administration weak spot. One is a political tin ear."

The message was received at the White House, where chief political adviser Karl Rove has made a fetish of keeping Bush’s conservative base happy. Among those sacrificed: Ian Bowles, a Democrat and a Clinton-administration holdover who had been working with the Bush team on carbon dioxide regulation, and who decided to leave in mid March — a few weeks earlier than he had planned — after he came under fire from the right.

Bowles, reached at his home in Woods Hole, says there is "no question" in his mind that the columns by Novak and Gigot, and criticism from others on the right, had an effect. "They were getting a lot of pressure from those folks, and they were responding to it," says Bowles, now a senior research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, who jokingly refers to "the evil deeds of the Clinton holdovers, of which I was one."