For Barack Obama, it wasn’t easy being green — until, suddenly, it was.

During his earlier years in office, Obama never pushed the environment to the forefront of the national agenda. The economy took precedence. Then health care. At one point, toward the end of Obama’s first term, environmentalists counted the months between presidential uses of the term “climate change.”


But now, Obama is aiming to make global reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions one of the signature achievements of his presidency — with his “historic agreement” with China last week just the start of a series of administrative actions aimed at combating climate change.

What changed, according to political and environmental sources close to the president, was Obama’s awareness that the environment is one of the few areas where a president can act unilaterally and to broad effect. Rallying nations and individuals alike to curb greenhouse-gas pollution is one mountaintop that Obama can climb, with or without Congress.

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“It’s an amazing turnaround, what he’s done,” said Rodger Schlickeisen, former president of Defenders of Wildlife. “It’s not the same as getting legislation. It’s not getting a new treaty ratified. But within the limits that he has to use executive power, I think it’s very impressive.”

Not all of the president’s supporters are fully convinced of his embrace of climate change as an urgent priority, and critics insist that some of Obama’s recent efforts, including the China deal, are less significant than they appear. Still, Schlickeisen and many other environmentalists now have high hopes for the new Environmental Protection Agency regulation due next June on carbon emissions from the nation’s coal plants, believing that an Obama unfettered by political concerns will embrace sharp reductions in carbon emissions.

But politics may still be playing a role — only this time in favor of aggressive action. Indeed, many in Obama’s political operation see the China deal and new EPA regulations as opportunities for a legacy achievement, the kind of statement that will resonate beyond his term of office.

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And while coal-state politicians rage against EPA, tougher pollution standards are broadly popular: Two-thirds of voters in an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll last June backed strong curbs on coal-plant emissions and more than half said they’d accept them even if it meant higher electricity bills.

“He’s in sync with the American public in making this a priority,” said former Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), who chaired the Energy and Natural Resources Committee during Obama’s first term. “I think we’re getting more and more to a point where a politician or an officeholder who’s opposed to doing anything for dealing with this problem is somewhat on the defensive.”

Erik Smith, a Democratic strategist who worked on Obama’s presidential campaigns, acknowledged that it took Obama a while to give up on working with Congress and rely instead on international agreements and the EPA rule-making process. After failing to get the Senate to support a “cap and trade” bill back in 2010, Smith said, Obama began to concentrate on what the president could achieve under his own power and through EPA. But he found that change couldn’t happen overnight.

“It takes some time for that process to work through the bureaucracy, and the White House [now] has a better understanding to pull the levers of power there,” Smith said.

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Of course, many environmentalists still chafe over the fact that Obama ceded the bully pulpit when it would have counted more, when Democrats had a filibuster-proof Senate majority in 2009 and the first weeks of 2010, and the House had already approved a “cap-and-trade” plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It only stung more that the BP oil spill offered Obama a perfect chance to speak to the country about the dangers of fossil fuels, but he didn’t use his presidency’s first Oval Office speech in June 2010 to make the case for that specific piece of legislation.

And while many are enthusiastic about Obama’s apparent about-face on using the power of the presidency to combat climate change, they stop well short of celebrating him as a great environmental president.

Obama's climate history 2008

Barack Obama and John McCain campaign for president pledging to pass cap-and-trade legislation. During his June speech on the night of the final Democratic primary, Obama says historians will remember, “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” After his general election victory, the president-elect declares that there are few challenges facing the U.S. “more urgent than combating climate change” and that “delay is no longer an option.” 2009

Obama spends about $80 billion on green energy through the economic stimulus package and announces the first fuel economy increase in decades, requiring new cars and trucks to reach 35.5 miles per gallon in 2016. The Democrat-controlled House passes the Waxman-Markey climate bill, 219-212. U.N. climate talks fail to reach a new treaty in Copenhagen, though Obama and other world leaders reach a “first-step” stopgap to maintains momentum. 2010

BP oil spill overwhelms Obama’s energy agenda, prompting his first-ever Oval Office address to the country. Senate fails to even vote on climate-change legislation, and Republicans win control of the House in November, knocking out more than two dozen Waxman-Markey supporters. 2011

Al Gore publishes 7,000-word essay in Rolling Stone magazine slamming Obama, saying he had “thus far failed to use the bully pulpit to make the case for bold action on climate change.” Clean energy stimulus winner Solyndra files for bankruptcy. 2012

Obama’s reelection campaign embraces a GOP energy talking point, calling for an “all-out, all-of-the-above” policy. He touts U.S. oil production at its highest level in eight years. Obama finalizes another suite of fuel economy standards for new vehicles to hit 54.5 mpg by 2025. 2013

He telegraphs his second-term climate agenda during his second inaugural address, State of the Union and a June speech at Georgetown University. EPA proposes a rule to limit greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants and says it will craft a similar regulation affecting the nation’s existing power plants — a much more ambitious effort. 2014

Obama signs deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The U.S. pledges to cut emissions by 26 percent to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. China agrees to stop carbon dioxide emission increase by 2030. 2015

Final rule on new power plants due in January, and final rule on existing plants due in June. International negotiations set to wrap up by end of year in Paris. Image 1: Getty

Obama still faces plenty of obstacles before he establishes his place alongside Theodore Roosevelt, who did more than any chief executive before him to conserve land, or Richard Nixon, who created EPA and signed the clean-water and clean-air acts. Republicans are itching for chances to kill the EPA rules through budget riders. Industry lawyers are already lining up to fight EPA in court.

“He certainly has some big press announcement type things that the greens are happy about, but I question how long lasting the legacy will be,” said Andrew Wheeler, an industry attorney and former top aide to outspoken climate skeptic Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.).

Lanhee Chen, the former top policy adviser on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, said Obama’s “progress on his green agenda has come at great costs,” pointing to Democratic losses earlier this month in Senate races in Kentucky and West Virginia. “Both [are] states where Democrats thought they would be more competitive but where the president’s green agenda cost them significant support,” Chen wrote in an email.

Chen also questioned the staying power of Obama’s agreement with China, which he described as “illusory” because “neither party is bound to do anything, and the Chinese have promised to meet goals that their population growth and migration trends would have allowed them to meet anyway.”

“So I am not nearly as sanguine about how successful the president has been in the pursuit of his green agenda,” Chen wrote, adding that Obama still faces a critical legacy-defining decision on the Keystone XL pipeline that divides his own Democratic base.

Many Democrats credit John Podesta, the former Clinton administration official who stepped into the crucial White House position of counselor to the president a year ago, with relentlessly advocating a stronger stand on climate change.

Speaking to reporters Monday during a conference call on state and local government efforts to prepare for climate change, Podesta made it clear Obama would keep his foot on the gas to advance his environmental agenda. “We’re going to keep pushing forward on all fronts to curb carbon pollution,” Podesta said, noting plans next June to wrap up EPA’s power plant rule.

“We’ve done a lot of work to date, and we have a lot more work to do in the last two years,” he added.

Indeed, some environmentalists point to the sharp increases in fuel-economy standards during Obama’s first term — enacted quietly, with the consent of auto makers — as a deceptively significant accomplishment after years of little or no change.

“That’s the holy grail for the environmental movement,” said environmental attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy and other Obama defenders insist they didn’t doubt the president’s commitment on the environment, even if he got repeatedly sidetracked by the economy and shifting political winds.

“It’s what happens. It’s the noise along the way,” said former Rep. Rick Boucher, a 14-term Virginia Democrat who played a critical role in House passage of the cap and trade bill only to lose his seat in the 2010 Republican wave. “He’s gotten to his goal. Not the way he wanted to. He wanted legislation, but he’s gotten there by a different path.”

Boucher credited Obama with sticking to pledges he recalled hearing the president make during his 2008 campaign, when he said climate change and health care would be his cornerstone issues.

“Along with the Affordable Care Act, it’ll stand as the second major pillar of that legacy,” Boucher said.

Kennedy said he’d like to see more action from the administration to improve the business climate for renewable energy sources, including greater access to the electricity transmission grid. The son of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy also said he isn’t ready to rank Obama alongside other top-tier green presidents: a list that he said includes Theodore Roosevelt, Gerald Ford, whoenacted the last suite of fuel economy standards before Obama’s, and Jimmy Carter, who installed solar panels on the White House roof.

“I think he’s building a strong legacy right now, and we’ll have to see what happens,” Kennedy said. “Carter built a legacy, but the Republicans dismantled it the moment he left office.”

Carrie Budoff Brown, Andrew Restuccia and Jonathan Topaz contributed to this report.