Obama's Last Shot - Rolling Stone

The president came into office promising to make fighting climate change a priority.  Now he finally seems to be getting serious about it.

President Obama is not even halfway through his second term yet, but you can almost feel the cement hardening around his feet.  The glory days of hope and change have faded, his approval rating has flat-lined below 50 percent, and jockeying for 2016 has begun in earnest.  But for Obama, the game ain't over yet.  In the next few months, he will take one of the biggest gambles of his presidency by testing the radical proposition that even SUV-loving Americans believe that global warming is real and are ready to do something about it.

It's a gamble that could have a profound impact on energy politics, our economy and our ability to stabilize the climate.  But if the president is wrong, it could not only cost his party control of the Senate this fall but also blow the last opportunity we have to save ourselves from life on a superheated planet.  "It's a transformative moment," says Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island in what may be the understatement of the century.

Obama's Last Shot - Rolling Stone