New Yorker: Graham feared Fox News backlash against climate bill negotiations

According to Ryan Lizza's October 11 New Yorker piece on “How the Senate and the White House missed their best chance to deal with climate change,” Sen. Lindsey Graham previously urged Sens. Joe Lieberman and John Kerry to advance climate bill negotiations as much as possible before Fox News could find out about it:

At a climate-change conference in South Carolina on January 5, 2010, Graham started to sound a little like Al Gore. “I have come to conclude that greenhouse gases and carbon pollution” are “not a good thing,” Graham said. He insisted that nobody could convince him that “all the cars and trucks and plants that have been in existence since the Industrial Revolution, spewing out carbon day in and day out,” could be “a good thing for your children and the future of the planet.” Environmentalists swooned. “Graham was the most inspirational part of that triumvirate throughout the fall and winter,” Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club, said. “He was advocating for strong action on climate change from an ethical and a moral perspective.”

But, back in Washington, Graham warned Lieberman and Kerry that they needed to get as far as they could in negotiating the bill “before Fox News got wind of the fact that this was a serious process,” one of the people involved in the negotiations said. “He would say, 'The second they focus on us, it's gonna be all cap-and-tax all the time, and it's gonna become just a disaster for me on the airwaves. We have to move this along as quickly as possible.' ”

Graham later walked away from climate bill efforts and said in June that he doesn't believe human-caused emissions “are contributing overwhelmingly to global climate change.”

In other news, so far this year “the global combined land and ocean surface temperature” is “tied with 1998 as the warmest January-August period on record,” and the Arctic sea ice reached its "third-lowest" minimum point since records began.

And here's just a taste of Fox News coverage of climate change issues:

Hannity: The “true agenda” behind global warming is to punish the U.S. and redistribute wealth

Doocy says of cap-and-trade: They “should call it the Congress change bill”

Fox's Kilmeade: “Sorry global warming people ... we have too many polar bears”

Fox graphic: “Blizzards putting the green agenda on ice: Good for the economy?”

Beck: “Jesus doesn't want a cap-and-trade system”