The increasingly cluttered second-term agenda may cloud climate activisits' goals. | M.Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO Will Obama punt again on climate?

Lofty words alone won't heal the Earth, but climate activists are still looking to President Barack Obama's inaugural speech on Monday for any sign that their cause has a place in an increasingly cluttered second-term agenda.

But here’s the reality check for the green movement: Obama has proposed no new strategy on climate, it’s unclear if one is in the works, and there’s no guarantee the issue will occupy a major place in the inaugural address or next month’s State of the Union. On alternative energy, his administration has committed billions of dollars, but made headlines so far mostly for the bankruptcy of Solyndra. And the administration soon could turn its back on its allies in the environmental community and approve the Keystone pipeline.


Between the constant fiscal crisis, the gun control debate and a looming immigration showdown, climate change runs the risk of landing on the permanent back burner.

At the same time, scientists are issuing ever more dire warnings that the window for action is closing.

Still, the president will have the attention of the nation on Monday. And environmentalists who fought to reelect Obama will be bitterly disappointed if he doesn't seize the occasion.

“It would be a huge missed opportunity if the president did not highlight the work we must do to address climate disruption,” said Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune.

Joe Romm, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, said Obama’s words matter — both in the inaugural address and in the State of the Union.

“It is crucial that he effectively communicates on climate in one or both of those speeches,” said Romm, who worked in the Energy Department during the Clinton administration. Romm added, “He hasn't given a single speech to the entire nation on climate change in his first term.”

Beyond the bully pulpit, groups like the Sierra Club are ramping up pressure on Obama to address the issue through executive action, such as tightening EPA regulations on existing power plants and killing the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada. Some liberal Democrats are trying to build momentum to tackle climate change in the Senate, although it’s unclear what their early strategizing will yield.

The departure of the president’s energy and environment team — Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson have said they are stepping down, and Energy Secretary Steven Chu is expected to resign soon — also gives Obama an opportunity to calibrate a new strategy on climate change. Options include reorganizing his advisers or holding a climate change summit at the White House, similar to the one he held in 2010 on health care.

Environmentalists are quick to praise what Obama has been able to accomplish in his first term, including his championing of green energy, EPA’s new rules on greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants, and a dramatic increase in vehicle fuel efficiency standards. Those steps will put at least a dent in the climate problem — and Obama has done enough for their cause that many green leaders are reluctant to trash him in public.

But the past four years also saw the death of cap and trade in the Senate, and no new global climate agreement to replace the doomed Kyoto accord.

Privately, a number of environmentalists are growing increasingly agitated with the president's reluctance to make the case with the American people, especially given what scientists call the daunting cuts in greenhouse gas emissions required to address the problem.

Activists argue that building public support for action could help break the logjam in Congress, pointing to polls that show the majority of Americans support addressing climate change. And they say the extreme weather that has touched much of the U.S. in the past year — Midwestern droughts, wildfires in the West and Hurricane Sandy in the Northeast — provides an opportunity to show how the issue touches people's lives.

“I think there’s an opportunity here to begin to talk about climate change as an issue that is beginning to have material effects on people, where they live, on their daily lives and on key economic sectors,” said Paul Bledsoe, a former Clinton White House climate aide who is now an independent consultant. He said the administration should organize events around the country that emphasize the effect climate change is having on regions of the U.S., suggesting that focusing on the devastation could help depoliticize the issue.

Recent alerts from scientists have added to the case for taking action.

Just last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said 2012 was the hottest year on record in the lower 48 states. A new draft federal report says temperatures in the U.S. could increase 5-10 degrees by the end of the century if nothing is done to curb greenhouse gas emissions, and that the resulting sea-level rise could affect 5 million Americans living in low-lying areas.

That threat deserves the same kind of public megaphone that Obama has used when talking to the public about the country’s fiscal problems, climate activists say.

“The long run up to the fiscal cliff is finally, and thankfully, over,” Dan Lashof, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's climate and clean air program, wrote last week. “Now, it’s time for the president to address an even more serious cliff: the climate change cliff — the one we’re fast approaching as the amount of global-warming pollution in our atmosphere continues to rise.”

But the president is still spending a huge amount of political capital on issues besides climate. The fiscal cliff has been replaced by the looming confrontation on the debt ceiling, and gun control is the issue where Obama promised this week that “I will put everything I’ve got into this.”

Obama often makes passing references to climate change but rarely addresses the issue in much depth. He mentioned it in his first inaugural speech, when he warned that “each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.”

More recently, Obama used his Democratic National Convention acceptance speech in September to proclaim that “climate change is not a hoax” — and to promise that “in this election, you can do something about it.”

In his victory speech on election night two months later, Obama said he wants America’s children to grow up in a world “that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.” He’s also named climate change as one of his top three second-term priorities.

Still, Obama's also made it clear that jobs and the economy will get his more urgent attention in the near term. “If the message is somehow that we’re going to ignore jobs and growth simply to address climate change, I don’t think anybody’s going to go for that. I won’t go for that,” he said during his first post-election press conference Nov. 14.

Worse, many activists fear Obama is about to approve Keystone, which they say would wreak havoc on the climate by sparking production from Canada's carbon-rich oil sands. That decision will be the real test of the president's commitment to addressing global warming, said Bill McKibben, founder of the group 350.org, which organized massive White House sit-ins against Keystone in 2011.

“Of course it’ll be good if he explains to people that climate change is the biggest problem we ever faced,” McKibben said. “But in 1988, George H.W. Bush said he would fight the ‘greenhouse gas effect’ with the ‘White House effect.’ This kind of declaration is not all that new in politics. What would be new is standing up to the fossil fuel industry on almost anything.”

Others, like Bledsoe, say Monday's an ideal opportunity to begin a crucial dialogue.

“Without question, the inaugural address is an unbelievably important opportunity,” he said.

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 3:38 p.m. on January 17, 2013.