In the budget unveiled Feb. 26 and in numerous pronouncements by Cabinet officials, the Obama administration has started to sketch out its environmental platform, but details are in short supply.
For example, the president's budget does not fund the Energy Department's plan to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
The federal government has spent more than 25 years and $13 billion investigating a place to store highly radioactive waste.
Yucca was not likely to open until 2020, despite a 1998 deadline set by Congress for the government to take charge of nuclear waste. Obama's position could further delay finding a final resting place for the radioactive materials piling up at the nation's nuclear plants.
Some experts, such as Robert Alvarez, a top Energy Department official during the Clinton administration, want the government to pick a new site for storing the waste. Alvarez recognizes the political difficulties ahead. "Everybody will just get angry if they learn their backyard might be a candidate site," he says.
The budget assumes passage of a law to curb emissions of the gases responsible for global warming.
Obama wants Congress to pass a bill that would set a strict cap on emissions. Companies would be required to pay the government for the right to emit global warming pollutants.
The budget includes revenue of $646 billion from 2012 to 2019 from such payments. Some of the money would pay for a middle-class income tax cut, some for research on solving global warming.
A wide spectrum of groups — from the Environmental Defense Fund to the Edison Electric Institute, which represents power plants — agree on the need to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, but there is disagreement over how to do it.
Lawmakers, who failed to pass a bill last year, will have to decide how much to cut emissions and how soon.
"This is going to be a very complex piece of legislation," says Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., who chairs a House subcommittee key to passage of a global warming bill. "In the end, politics is the art of the possible."
