“In the short term they’re going to be hyper-focused on winning the election, and less focused on the environmental and energy issues,” Cappiello said. “They really want to keep the focus on the economy because that’s what people are voting for. You have to remember, depending on how you ask the question, high energy prices are really high up there, but if you make it climate change and global warming, that’s really down the totem pole in terms of what people are concerned about.”

For a time, before the full impact of the economic crisis hit, Sarah Palin’s nomination for the Republican vice presidency renewed interest in energy and environmental coverage. Even last month’s endangered-species listing of the Cook Inlet Beluga Whale became national headlines because of Palin’s opposition. “Usually that would go out over the [Alaska AP] state wire,” Cappiello said. “The positions of these candidates, whether they’re talking about them directly or not, elevate stories on the environmental and energy beat that wouldn’t be so elevated in the absence of the political campaign.”

Yet with Palin, problems of access continued, perhaps to an even greater degree. Eilperin, who spent “a lot” of her time with the governor in recent months, says she’s “never had a chance to ask her a direct question.” Samuelsohn and Cappiello both pointed to Palin’s somewhat ambiguous stance on the causes of global warming, and how, prior to her interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson, many newspapers were relegated to reprinting a single, skeptical quote that Palin had given to Newsmax magazine.

So in some ways, this may be a relatively diminished ending for the presidential energy beat, but the race has also elevated that coverage to unprecedented urgency and prominence. Though the story has waxed and waned throughout the campaign, voters now seem to have a clearer understanding of how integral energy policy will be to the next administration. And the energy beat will surely see an upswing in the election’s immediate aftermath.

“I don’t think [anything new about Obama and McCain] is going to break through the sort of exhaustion of the campaign and the anticipation of the race being over,” Samuelsohn said. “From the energy and environment perspective, I think it’s more, ‘Let’s get ready for what’s to come.’ That’s what I’m going to try pursue here in the final weeks.”

Eilperin concurred: “When this election is over, the immediate task that reporters will face is — give Americans a sense of how the policies may shift after eight years of George Bush in the White House, and what does that mean for their lives as well as for the global economic, environment and energy outlook … I think there’s no question that the economic downturn raises serious concerns over what sort of policies governments across the globe are going to be willing to pursue in light of recent developments.”

All three agreed that the next president’s choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency is glaringly important, given the agency’s Supreme Court mandate to regulate carbon dioxide as an air pollutant. Internationally, it will be important to watch the United Nations-sponsored climate talks in Poland this December, and whether or not the president-elect has a presence there. Whatever happens, it’s likely that energy policy will change, perhaps radically, and that the energy beat’s role in this campaign was no mere guest appearance.

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