1. CAMPAIGN 2008: Climate will rise in the new White House agenda (ClimateWire, 11/05/2008)

Christa Marshall, ClimateWire reporter

With the resounding victory of Barack Obama, national climate policy appears poised to take a 180-degree turn and rise toward the top of the stack of issues the President-elect will focus upon.

Yet many energy analysts say the Democratic Illinois senator faces a rocky road in meeting his campaign promise to enact an aggressive mandatory cap on greenhouse gases. The early months of the new administration will provide signals of whether the nation's new leader intends to move full throttle on global warming or defer it to deal with more pressing issues, such as the economy, they say.

"It will be crucial to watch the public statements all the way down the line, from the president to people going through confirmations," said Manik Roy, director of congressional affairs at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. "Are they just saying 'climate change,' or are they saying 'cap and trade'?"

In his victory remarks on election night, Obama gave few hints of his immediate intent on climate, mentioning the word "energy" only once in a broad speech that invoked the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. He noted that his climb as president would be steep and said, "We may not get there in one year, or even in one term."

Early indications from people familiar with the Obama transition team are that he intends to create some sort of energy council within the White House, a sign that he at least wants the issue to rise above some other domestic concerns. The president-elect said on the campaign trail that fueling a green jobs boom would be his top priority in the Oval Office.

In a flurry of e-mails sent out last night, several environmental groups expressed hope that Obama would follow his campaign pledge calling for reducing carbon emissions to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

But history is riddled with examples of big energy plans that didn't make into law. President Clinton, for example, proposed a "Btu (British thermal unit) tax" on the heat content of fuels and wanted revision of animal grazing rights in the West, but watched his initiatives fail, even when his own party controlled Capitol Hill.

Part of the problem for Clinton was inadequate communication with Congress, according to some political scientists, but he also backed down quickly when facing opposition from the National Association of Manufacturers and other industry groups.

'Coal Country's' needs will have to be addressed

With climate change, Obama will have to tread carefully in addressing the needs of the coal industry, according to Columbia University sociologist Dana Fisher. In an upcoming paper, she provides extensive documentation of a linkage between congressional votes against climate legislation and the fossil-fuel production of a member's home state.

"I think any climate legislation is highly unlikely unless a deal can be made directly with coal states," she said. "This is a regional issue, not a partisan one."

The last major environmental legislation that many people point to was passed 18 years ago, when Congress and the administration of President George H.W. Bush worked out agreements to pass amendments to the Clean Air Act.

"The lesson from the Btu tax was that you don't allow a vote on a bill until you know it's going to pass," said one former Clinton official.

One advantage Obama might have in avoiding such mistakes is his inside-the-Beltway career. Democratic presidents such as Clinton and Carter ran into trouble when they brought state officials from their terms as governors, who were loyalists but also knew little about the intricacies of the nation's capital, said Brian Cook, a professor of public and international affairs at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

Another lesson from the political past involves timing, which in Obama's case could leave a window of as little as six months to get major climate legislation passed in his first term, considering the span between the confirmation of key officials and the beginning of the 2010 election season.

"The more time that passes, the harder it's going to be to get a climate bill," said Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He said one force potentially helping the issue would be that Obama will need a domestic policy victory outside of the economy. In that sense, climate change -- or at least a big renewable energy push -- likely would be in the running with health care as an issue on which he might choose to focus.

The most dangerous time for any administration is right after the inauguration, when the executive branch is not fully staffed and expectations are high, according to Roy.

The use of executive powers could move Congress

By watching for things like an Obama administration's ability to meet a summer 2009 deadline to set rules for a greenhouse gas registry, observers will find out relatively soon whether the issue has legs, he said. To make a statement on the topic, Obama could do something early, such as ordering the Environmental Protection Agency to develop a regulatory structure for carbon capture and sequestration of coal-fired power plants.

He also could quickly grant California its requested waiver to set tight emissions standards for vehicles, a move that could have a ripple effect with other states and put pressure on Congress to act on climate, said Barry Rabe, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan.

Although there are cap-and-trade bills floating around Congress, including one drafted by Democratic Reps. Rick Boucher of Virginia and John Dingell of Michigan, many expect the majority party to let Obama take the lead on the topic. The president-elect could quickly send a set of legislative principles to lawmakers, but would need months to draft a major bill through executive branch employees in EPA and the Energy and Treasury Departments, who themselves may not be confirmed immediately.

"Late in 2009 will be a critical time," said Samuel Thernstrom, co-director of the geoengineering project at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Bush administration official.

Jason Grumet, one of Obama's senior advisers, recently created a stir when he said EPA would regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act unless Congress could enact a climate bill within 18 months.

"Nothing gets Congress moving like the threat of unchecked executive authority," said Kevin Book, a senior analyst at FBR Capital Markets, in a climate policy outlook paper released this week.

Lack of Republican moderates could be an obstacle

Like past presidents who came into office with large electoral margins and single-party rule in Washington, Obama will still have to gain cooperation from the GOP to move environmental legislation. Ironically, the losses of moderate Republicans like John Sununu in New Hampshire last night could make his path more difficult in this regard, since they would have been some of the likely candidates to bring in necessary GOP votes, said Rabe.

"Presidents succeed or fail largely on how they deal with the worst excesses of their own party," said Thernstrom. In his view, that means that as president, Obama will have to make it clear early on to environmental groups that they're not going to get everything they want with global warming policy.

He also advised that he not bring former Vice President Al Gore in as a climate czar, an idea that has been floated but that one Obama adviser this week said was unlikely to become reality.

But perhaps the greater challenge for Obama is how to sell climate policies to the public. According to Rabe, Obama has "boxed himself in" to a certain degree by emphasizing tax cuts to the middle class, making the prospect of higher energy costs via a climate bill a hard sell.

One marketing answer to that dilemma comes from research by Jon Krosnick at Stanford University, who found that emphasizing the successes of cap and trade in controlling acid rain made a much more positive impact on an individual's view of the scheme than any other comparison.

With the national debt ballooning and states seeking cash, some business leaders like former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney are calling cap and trade a job-killer.

Many environmentalists, though, are making the argument that a ceiling on greenhouse gases is the new financial savior for the federal government. By emphasizing that the system could, in theory, pay for itself and could create millions of clean energy jobs, they say the public will get behind the idea if the administration spotlights the revenue-building side of carbon cutting.

"In fact, auctioning emissions permits may be one of the few tools an Obama administration has left to bring the government from deficit to surplus," said Tony Kreindler, a spokesman for the Environmental Defense Fund.

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