Blame for U.S. failure on climate action falls on Washington, D.C.-based environmental groups, not on the White House, a study says.

According to Harvard University scholar Theda Skocpol, environmental groups were blind to the extreme polarization of Congress -- where climate issues are concerned -- and underestimated the rising influence of the tea party. Believing they could still win through "insider grand bargaining," they doomed any efforts to get a climate law through Congress and made it much harder to achieve climate action in the future, she said.

Environmental groups such as the U.S. Climate Action Partnership never understood the shift in conservative popular opinion by 2007 and failed to build broad grass-roots organizations needed to push for change, Skocpol wrote.

What's more, she argued, there is little hope Obama will put climate change on the top of his agenda.

"Whatever environmentalists may hope, the Obama White House and congressional Democrats are unlikely to make global warming a top issue in 2013 or 2014," Skocpol wrote.

The study will likely cause a stir among environmentalists hoping to see action on climate change during the president's second term (Suzanne Goldenberg, London Guardian, Jan. 14). -- IP