"Climate is gone.”

It didn’t take long for some victorious Republicans to confirm environmentalists’ worst fears after Tuesday’s election, which put the Grand Old Party back in charge of the House of Representatives. Offering a keynote speech at a trade show for natural gas executives on election day, GOP strategist Karl Rove asssured the Pennsylvania energy crowd that “climate is gone.”

In the Bush White House, Rove was considered all-powerful, but in this case he was surely referring not to a previously unheralded ability to control global atmosphere from the Washington, D.C.  headquarters of his hyper-funded conservative lobbying groups American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, but to the fate of the huge House energy bill that passed last year before stalling in the Senate.

And President Obama has admitted that we won't see a similarly big energy bill soon: "When it comes to something like energy, what we're probably going to have to do is say here are some areas where there's just too much disagreement between Democrats and Republicans, we can't get this done right now.”

The difference is that Obama still hopes to pursue energy legislation (“Let's go ahead and start making some progress on the things that we do agree on, and we can continue to have a strong and healthy debate about those areas where we don't.") while Rove delighted oil-shale execs by telling them "I don't think you need to worry" that the new Congress would get anywhere near legislation to tighten controls on hydraulic fracturing—the process by which water, sand, and chemicals are injected under high pressure into shall formations to recover natural gas.

--Reed McManus