The double billing provided a good view into the party’s unsettled climate agenda. The problem for Democrats is not that they have too few options; it’s that they have too many. Since 2010, when the Obama administration’s climate bill failed, dozens of senators and representatives have proposed various climate policies big and small, including several variations on a carbon tax. But these proposals have been advanced haphazardly, to send a message, with little hope of passage.

This is a very different problem from the one faced by the GOP. While many Republicans in Congress will now affirm the reality of climate change, the party has not advanced a serious policy proposal in years. And the Republican president is furiously undoing climate-focused regulations—and questioning the underlying scientific basis—as fast and energetically as he can.

Now, with a House majority and a newly climate-concerned public, the Democratic Party is searching for a serious legislative way forward—and so far, its moderates have found the Green New Deal lacking.

The party is almost totally united around one climate policy: being in the Paris Agreement, which the Trump administration has promised to leave. (For legal reasons, the United States cannot fully exit the pact until late 2020.) Pelosi would not have introduced the Climate Action Now Act if it couldn’t pass her caucus overwhelmingly. She even gave it a single-digit number—in the House filing system, it’s known as H.R. 9—to underscore its importance; it sits on a par with Democrats’ bills on campaign finance (H.R. 1), LGBTQ equality (H.R. 5), and gun control (H.R. 8).

Rejoining the Paris Agreement won’t do anything by itself, though. The agreement is mostly nonbinding, and it imposes few requirements on its member states. During the Obama administration, the laws that actually cut carbon emissions weren’t Paris-related; they were rules issued by the Environmental Protection Agency under the Clean Air Act.

So the Climate Action Now Act aims to put some legal muscle behind Paris. It uses Congress’s power over the federal purse to shore up the accord, prohibiting the executive branch from spending any money to advance the withdrawal from the climate treaty. Similar language appeared in the bipartisan NATO Support Act, which passed the House earlier this year and forbade U.S. withdrawal from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

When it first joined the Paris Agreement, the United States promised to cut, by 2025, its carbon emissions to at least 26 percent below their historic peak. The country is currently not on track to meet that goal.

The Climate Action Now Act requires the White House to submit a plan saying how it will make that 26 percent target. It also mandates that a new, more ambitious plan be submitted every year. But it provides no legal mechanism to punish the president if he fails to follow through on a plan he submitted.