These days the crisis atmosphere is gone and unemployment is at 5.5 percent, but Mr. Deese is still running the economic numbers at the White House on a different kind of crisis that is preoccupying the president. Mr. Deese’s job as Mr. Obama’s senior adviser in charge of climate policy is to push the president’s ambitious environmental agenda to governors, industry executives and international negotiators -- while under daily political attacks from Congress and the coal industry.
“It’s not the harrowing urgency of the economy falling off the cliff,” Mr. Deese, 37, said of his new job during a recent interview in his West Wing office, just steps down the hall from Mr. Obama’s. “But it’s the urgency of, ‘We have a limited amount of time left to change the trajectory on a really urgent crisis.’ ”
After glossing over Deese's total inexperience for the job, they go to bat for him:
But Mr. Deese, who must now make sales pitches to governors and participate in global talks, has a reputation as a fast study.
“With no business experience at all, he plunged into the auto thing with us and really figured it out,” said Steven Rattner, the financial adviser who led Mr. Obama’s auto bailout team. “He added an unbelievable amount of value with the way he thinks things through. I could totally trust his judgment.”
....
He loves to cite his favorite new statistic: a recent report by the International Energy Agency that found that last year, global gross domestic product grew 3 percent, while carbon dioxide emissions flatlined. Historically, economic growth has paralleled the growth in fossil fuel emissions.
“The data show it’s possible to grow the economy without growing pollution,” Mr. Deese said with visible excitement.
The reporters buttered up Deese and his "amazing policy I.Q.," an eager wonk happiest when he's going full nerd on a vital left-wing issue:
Known for pacing while he talks on the telephone and sometimes going without shoes in the office, Mr. Deese appears at his most animated when plunging headlong into the wonkery of an issue.
“This is somebody whose greatest joy is that swift arc up the learning curve,” said Gene Sperling, the president’s former national economics adviser. “He has both this amazing policy I.Q. that he can bring to any issue as well as the humility to reach out and find and listen to every expert on the planet on that issue.”
Supporters of fossil fuels weren't so flattered, characterized twice by the Times as motivated by "anger."
In March, Mr. Deese was in Kentucky, where anger against Mr. Obama’s climate change plan runs deep . The plan requires states to cut carbon emissions, effectively forcing them to change their energy supply from fossil fuels to renewable sources -- a tough sell in a coal-mining state like Kentucky. There Mr. Deese appeared with Governor Steven L. Beshear, a Democrat, at an event promoting a federal program to help coal communities and then spoke with him for an hour afterward about the climate change plan.
But Mr. Deese has hardly assuaged the anger over the plan , particularly among Republicans who see it as either a war on coal or a vast overreach through the E.P.A. regulations of Mr. Obama’s executive authority. If put in place over the next year, the plan could drive major changes in the nation’s economy in the next decade, from shutting down coal-fired power plants, spurring renewable electricity generation and forcing automakers to build fleets of all-electric vehicles.
It's clear what side of that divide the reporters' sympathies lie:
Mr. Deese, who has a young daughter, arrives in the West Wing at 6:45 a.m. after a two-mile run to work, showers, then slings his yellow backpack on the hook on the back of his office door. He knows he does not have much time: The president and his allies fear that if the climate plan is not locked in place before Mr. Obama leaves office, a Republican president could undo it.
“You have to work fast -- each day matters,” said Carol Browner, who served as Mr. Obama’s senior climate change adviser in his first term. “You have to ask, ‘Have we lost a day? Have we lost a week?’ ” As Mr. Deese put it, “It’s a different kind of emergency.”
The text box underlined the story's treatment of "global warming" as an undisputed fact on the ground: "From a cooling economy to a warming world."
