WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama will propose a sweeping plan to address climate change Tuesday, setting ambitious goals and timetables for a series of executive actions to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and prepare the nation for the ravages of a warming planet.
The plan, to be announced in a policy address at Georgetown University, is the most far-reaching effort by a U.S. president to address what many experts consider the defining environmental and economic challenge of the 21st century. But it also could provoke a backlash from some in Congress and in states dependent on coal and other industries, who will say that it imposes costly, job-killing burdens on a still-fragile economy.
In a speech in Berlin last week, Obama called climate change “the global threat of our time” and promised swift action to avert it. The plan to be announced Tuesday represents his first serious effort to engage the problem since he threw his support behind a Democratic cap-and-trade proposal in the House in 2009 to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions. That legislation died in the Senate in 2010.
None of what the president plans to propose will require action by Congress, which has shown no appetite for dealing with global warming and its attendant energy challenges in a comprehensive way. But some of what the president hopes to accomplish is likely to face legal and political challenges, including the possible use of a rarely used law that allows Congress to overturn executive branch regulations.
Top-level White House aides and Cabinet officers have been working on the climate plan for months to support the “conversation” on climate change that Obama promised shortly after he was re-elected last November.