Either way, most Senate watchers, inside and out, think the odds of a major climate bill are not great. And if this White House and this Democratic Congress can’t pass one, you have to wonder what the future of climate policy looks like.

All the while, the risks and costs of climate change grow. Sea levels are rising faster than scientists predicted just a few years ago. Himalayan glaciers are melting. In the American West, pine beetles (which struggle to survive the cold) are multiplying and killing trees.

According to NASA , 2010 is on course to be the planet’s hottest year since records started in 1880. The current top 10, in descending order, are: 2005, 2007, 2009, 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2004, 2001 and 2008.

Hot is the new normal.

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The most efficient way to begin attacking the global swelter is no mystery. It involves raising the price of carbon emissions, which are warming the planet, and then letting the private sector find innovative ways to use less dirty energy. Conservative economists, like Gregory Mankiw, support this approach. So do liberals, like Joseph Stiglitz.

But taxing carbon has never had much of a political chance. It’s too honest. It acknowledges that the best way to reduce the use of a product is to increase its price. We would all prefer a free lunch.

So Congress has been laboring to disguise a price increase in a more palatable package.

Last June, the House passed a cap-and-trade bill. It set a national cap on carbon emissions and required companies to have permits for such emissions. To keep emitting as much as they had been, companies would have to buy permits from more efficient companies.

Republican leaders, though, were only too happy to cast cap and trade as “cap and tax .” In the process, they helped scare away senators who had long supported this very idea, like Lindsey Graham . The sad paradox is that cap and trade — which trusts in the efficiency of markets — was originally a Republican policy, signed by the first President Bush to reduce acid rain, and disliked at the time by many liberals.

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With a comprehensive cap off the table, Senate leaders began thinking instead about a narrower version that would apply only to power plants, not to emissions from vehicles or factories. This utility-only cap has two advantages.

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One, it goes after the emissions that energy experts think will be among the cheapest to reduce. Two, it involves another layer of political disguise. The cap would apply to unlovable utilities, not to American families and businesses.

Of course, the cap would ultimately raise utility rates. That’s the point. So long as dirty energy remains so cheap, people are going to use huge amounts of it.

But some policy makers haven’t been willing to acknowledge this. They continue to look for a solution without downsides. For them, a tempting option is a series of new rules requiring people to use cleaner energy. In a few cases, such rules really are a free lunch, in that they force people to take steps — like home insulation — that save money. But most rules increase costs. They force people away from the energy sources they are now using.

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The classic example is the fuel economy rules from the 1970s that required car companies to make fewer gas guzzlers. The newly imposed scarcity of guzzlers, in turn, increased their price. But the relationship wasn’t obvious. Americans do not think of fuel economy rules as a tax on large vehicles.

This explains why the rule-based approach seems to be the best bet for winning Republican votes. Senator Richard Lugar, Republican of Indiana , has proposed new rules not just for vehicles but also for appliances, building codes and power plants.

If these regulations were tough enough, they could make a difference, as the fuel economy rules have. So some Democrats and environmentalists see this approach as their best remaining chance. “There’s a way Senator Reid and the president could manage this to get a very strong energy bill,” Hal Harvey, head of the ClimateWorks Foundation in San Francisco , said. “The victory is there for them to have.”

On the other hand, such rules would require government regulators to make all kinds of decisions — about which dishwashers qualified as efficient, about which alternative energies power plants had to use and the like. Businesses and consumers couldn’t look simply for the cheapest solution, as they could if Congress put a price on carbon. They would have to comply with specific provisions.

The result would almost certainly be higher, albeit better disguised, costs than with a carbon cap or tax. Even many advocates admit that new rules won’t do enough, on their own, to reduce emissions and slow warming. Only a cap or a tax can accomplish that at a reasonable cost.

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Thus the opposition among other Democrats and environmentalists to accepting the Lugar approach as a compromise — and Mr. Reid’s difficulty in finding 60 votes for it.

For one thing, the Lugar critics think that some Republicans may, in the end, be willing to vote for a utility-only cap. And even if the alternative was to do virtually nothing, critics say that might be better than a modest bill that let the Senate pretend it was seriously attacking global warming.

Robert Stavins, the Harvard economist, told me he would actually prefer a bill that cut emissions less in the short term but created a template for much bigger cuts in the future. “Success, to me, would be the beginning of political acceptance of carbon pricing,” he said.

I’ll confess to being torn about these arguments. A utility-only cap, even a flawed one, really would represent a whole different kind of progress than a souped-up version of fuel economy rules. A cap — any decent cap — remains the best benchmark of success.

Yet if the Lugar approach were the only one that could pass, should we be so confident that it would put off further action? It’s not clear to me how another failure on energy policy will somehow make success more likely in the future.

All of this will be decided in the next few weeks, before the Senate breaks for its August recess, or in September, before the midterm election campaign takes over. Meanwhile, the temperature in Washington this week is supposed to hit 99.