The bones of the Obama administration's climate science and adaptation policy may already be set by the time the Senate gets around to voting on the House-passed climate bill.

Sweeping energy legislation the House approved Friday puts the federal government's main climate research program and its burgeoning adaptation effort under White House control. It is a move that analysts said signals a policy priority for the White House and places climate change programs under the thumb of President Obama's science adviser, John Holdren.

"The beauty of this is, when it's at the White House level, the horsepower is behind it on behalf of the whole nation, with the notion that the president is endorsing it," said Bob Corell, vice president for programs and policy at the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment.

There already are signs the White House is not waiting for Congress to complete its climate work.

House Science and Technology Chairman Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.) admitted as much earlier this month, as his committee revised its plan for a National Climate Service to help local, state and tribal governments and businesses adapt to global warming.

"The administration has the ability to develop a climate service without legislative authority," Gordon said. "The question is, do we feel with our input they can do a better job?"

Gordon's committee rewrote its legislation to hand control of the climate service to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) after it received word that the office, along with the Council on Environmental Quality and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was already moving to develop a national adaptation plan closely related to the work of the proposed climate service.

'More horsepower'

Meanwhile, OSTP chief Holdren released a major federal climate science report last week under the auspices of the U.S. Global Change Research Program -- resurrecting the Clinton-era name and structure of a program the Bush administration split in two and transferred from White House to agency oversight.

Asked about the change, Holdren said the White House was "looking at the structure and opportunities for ... what has been called the Climate Change Science Program and Climate Change Technology Program."

The House-passed climate bill would rewrite the 1990 law that established the climate research program, placing it under OSTP's control and emphasizing the need to identify U.S. vulnerability to the effects of climate change.

That is in line with the existing Global Change Research Act, said Michael MacCracken, a scientist at the Climate Institute who spent nine years working for U.S. Global Change Research Program. He is not sure reworking that law is necessary to give the White House a more active role with federal climate science research or place new emphasis on climate adaptation.

"It seems to me the mechanism is already there," MacCracken said. "What you want to do is try to enhance the mechanism and not try to reshuffle the mechanism to make something new."

But Nick Sundt, former communications director for the Climate Change Science Program, said that several provisions of the current statute are outdated.

"It refers to entities that no longer exist," said Sundt, now communications director at the World Wildlife Fund.

And other experts said even small revisions to the existing law could improve the interagency climate research effort's budget muscle, no small feat given that its 13 member agencies control their own spending.

The Heinz Center's Corell, who served as the program's first director from 1987 to 2000, said bringing the renamed Global Change Research Program back into the White House signals it is a policy priority for President Obama and places it closer to the Office of Management and Budget.

"It gives the program more horsepower," Corell said.

Strengthening support through legislation

The House-passed climate bill is also poised to send billions of dollars to domestic, international, public health and wildlife adaptation programs by portioning revenue from the sale of carbon dioxide emissions allowances to polluters.

"It seems to me that the legislation is necessary in just about each and every case," said Rick Piltz, executive director of ClimateScienceWatch and a former Climate Change Science Program employee during the George W. Bush administration. "Even in cases where you could establish something in the executive branch, there are funding mechanisms for a lot of it that you need to have in the bill, because the revenue comes from auctioning emissions allowances."

Eric Haxthausen, director of U.S. climate policy for the Nature Conservancy, said the Obama administration could begin planning the kinds of programs laid out in the House bill but said finding the money to realize them without enacting a broader bill would be nearly impossible.

"Take the recent federal climate science report, which said the U.S. could be looking at 2-3 feet of sea level rise this century," Haxthausen said. "That would really swamp a lot of coastal areas. You need to have conscious, thoughtful strategies to deal with that, and that's not inexpensive. ... Without the [climate] bill, you'd have to come up with another serious legislative strategy to find that level of funding."

And when it comes to the National Climate Service, including it in the climate legislation now moving through Congress may have strengthened support for the plan, Piltz said, because it stirred debate over what the program should look like. Bush administration officials at NOAA began discussions about creating a climate service within that agency last year, an outline the Obama administration initially followed.

"In Jane Lubchenco's first talk -- days after she was confirmed -- she talked about a National Climate Service at NOAA," Piltz said. "Even on the Hill, people were saying, 'This is a done deal. The administration wants Dr. Lubchenco and NOAA to have this.' But there was some pushback on that, saying, 'Wait a minute, there are problems with giving it to a single agency or even a single lead agency.'"