In The Arena Why Obama Had to Act on Climate Congress couldn’t get it done. We know, because we tried.

Joseph Lieberman, former U.S. senator from Connecticut, is now senior counsel at Kasowitz Benson Torres & Friedman, LLP. Tim Profeta is director of the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University.

After months of anticipation, the Environmental Protection Agency has proposed the first-ever regulations to reduce greenhouse gas pollution from existing power plants. As the source of about one-third of the United States greenhouse gas emissions, power plants are key to any serious effort to reduce global warming, making this the most significant action to address the threat of climate change that President Obama can take during his second term.

We applaud the president for this act of leadership. These regulations, if executed correctly, could be the first step back on the road to a domestic consensus to address climate change.


There are few problems of greater importance to our country and the world than climate change. As a recent parade of studies have shown, climate change threatens the planet’s ability to keep us all safe and secure. From heat waves to the growing threat of extreme weather events, the negative effects of climate change are already being felt every day in the United States and across the globe, providing early warning of what is to come.

Few issues are more politically paralyzed than climate change—as we know from firsthand experience. The accelerating calls from scientists to act are matched by the accelerating sterility of the political debate. The media regularly juxtaposes the dire findings and warnings of scientific panels with far less credible statements of disbelief from politicians and interested parties. And while this disconnect may make interesting reading, it does nothing to help solve the problem for the sake of our children and grandchildren.

The two of us are all too familiar with the sad state of political discourse on the issue. As a senator, one of us worked for years on bipartisan proposals to deal with climate change, successively with Republican Sen. John McCain, John Warner and Lindsey Graham, all aimed at enacting a market-based system for reducing pollution from greenhouse gases—an idea that originated under President George H.W. Bush for reducing acid rain. As a former Senate staffer and current director of the Nicholas Institute at Duke University, the other of us worked to assemble those early legislative proposals and now looks to design constructive policy solutions at the helm of a nonpartisan academic institute.

Over those years, we have seen the threat of climate change grow consistently while the political appeal of the climate issue has waxed and waned. At the time of the negotiation of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the issue was seen as politically dead after the Senate voted 95-0 to disagree with the principles that were written into the Kyoto document. But we worked our way back from that nadir, with some bipartisan support, to shine a spotlight on the facts of climate change and create a strong legislative proposal that garnered 44 votes in the Senate in 2003.

Unfortunately, we came up short, and assembling congressional support for climate legislation now looks even more daunting. There is no reason for optimism that any time soon there will be enough votes in Congress to adopt comprehensive legislation that will stem the tide of harmful climate change.

Congress’s continuing failure to even begin to deal with the challenge of climate change has left President Obama and the EPA with no choice but to use their legal powers to try avert a climate catastrophe. It would be irresponsible not to do so.

The Supreme Court, in 2007, affirmed that the executive branch has all of the authority it needs under the Clean Air Act to require greenhouse gas reductions from existing power plants. As designed, the act gives the federal government the authority to set the pollution reduction targets, but it is the states that write the plans to meet those targets.

That process will reduce the carbon pollution in the air, and, as importantly, will bring constructive policymaking down to the state level, where creative governors and their administrations can design plans to reduce pollution and address their states’ individual needs. Implemented correctly, these programs will build examples of successful action that will hopefully increase comfort with their adoption and application nationally.

This effort is already working, even in coal-based and manufacturing states like Kentucky and West Virginia, which are drafting white papers discussing what might be done under their plans. Kentucky’s legislature recently passed a law to limit the state’s authority to regulate under the Clean Air Act, but it did so in a way that assumed the state would regulate carbon pollution.

Eventually, the scale and reality of the climate-change challenge will demand that we return to Congress for the more comprehensive solution that requires changes in law. The EPA regulations cannot solve the issue on their own. The agency’s actions, however, can stimulate the innovation in the states necessary to design smart approaches to reduce pollution that can be translated across the country. And if those programs succeed, they may also help us build political consensus to act, because their example will show that we do not have to choose between addressing climate change and growing the economy.

This week’s actions by President Obama and the EPA are the best we can do to address the problem in the politics of today. Hopefully, they also will be the first step to a better solution in the politics of tomorrow.