WASHINGTON — President Obama will propose a sweeping plan to address climate change on 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 an American 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 dependant 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, Mr. Obama called climate change “the global threat of our time” and promised swift action to avert it. The plan to be announced on 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 will likely 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 Mr. Obama promised shortly after he was re-elected last November.
White House aides said the timing for Mr. Obama’s speech had been set weeks ago. But the initiative is likely to be at least somewhat drowned out by a rush of competing and compelling news: a series of major Supreme Court decisions; the drama over the travels of the National Security Agency leaker Edward J. Snowden; a debate in Congress on comprehensive immigration reform; and the failing health of Nelson Mandela, the former South African president.
Mr. Obama leaves for a weeklong trip to Africa the day after the climate speech.
Aides said Mr. Obama would propose the first limits on carbon pollution from existing power plants and would promise to complete pending rules for new plants. He will direct the Environmental Protection Agency to work with states and industries to devise standards for emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases from existing power plants by June 2014, the aides said, and will finalize the rules in June of the following year.
The president will also direct the agency to finalize standards for new fossil fuel power plants by the end of September. The rules, first proposed in April 2012, were supposed to be completed by April but are being rewritten to address potential legal and technical problems.
Daniel P. Schrag, a geochemist who is the head of Harvard University’s Center for the Environment and a member of a presidential science panel that has helped advise the White House on climate change, said he hoped the presidential speech would mark a turning point in the national debate on climate change.
“Everybody is waiting for action,” he said. “The one thing the president really needs to do now is to begin the process of shutting down the conventional coal plants. Politically, the White House is hesitant to say they’re having a war on coal. On the other hand, a war on coal is exactly what’s needed.”
The administration will also begin a new round of fuel efficiency standards for heavy-duty trucks to continue improvements already in effect for model years 2014-18. The plan includes new efficiency targets for appliances and buildings to cut carbon pollution by three billion metric tons cumulatively by 2030, equivalent to half of a full year’s total emissions.
The president will commit to $ 7 billion in financing for international climate mitigation and adaptation projects, primarily in developing countries and nations most vulnerable to rising seas and other climate-related threats. But it is not clear now much of that is new money and how much is already committed under existing international aid programs.
The package includes $ 8 billion in loan guarantees for innovative energy efficiency and fossil fuel projects, including efforts to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions from power plants burning coal and natural gas.
Taken together, the officials said, the pieces of the plan would allow the United States to meet Mr. Obama’s goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. That was the promise Mr. Obama made at the United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen in December 2009.
Environmental advocates, who have been impatiently waiting for Mr. Obama to make good on repeated pledges to address climate change, said they were encouraged by the forthcoming proposals.
“Really, this is a moment that’s been 20 years in the making,” said David Hawkins, director of the climate center at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Most of the last 20 years, unfortunately, have not been well spent.”
Andrew Steer, the president of the World Resources Institute and a former top official at the World Bank, called the presidential initiative “extraordinarily important.”
“The United States has been notable in recent years for a lack of a national climate strategy,” Mr. Steer said in a telephone briefing for reporters. “It’s a wonderful thing to see that he is reclaiming this issue.”
Environmental advocates will likely be disappointed that the president will not directly address the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry 800,000 gallons a day of heavy oil from the Canadian province of Alberta to Gulf Coast refineries.
Most environmental groups oppose the project on the grounds that the crude mined from Canadian oil sands is particularly carbon intensive and will significantly exacerbate climate change. They have mounted large street protests and media campaigns to pressure the president to veto the project, making it a symbolic test of his commitment to dealing with climate change.
“If he were to apply the same level of scrutiny to the pipeline as he did to this climate strategy, we are very optimistic that he would reject it as inconsistent with his other climate goals,” said Melinda Pierce of the Sierra Club.
A senior administration official who briefed reporters on the president’s climate plan said Monday that the decision on the Keystone pipeline was on a separate track at the State Department and would not be announced for months.
Obama Outlines Ambitious Plan to Cut Greenhouse Gases
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