Within a week of the election, president Gene Karpsinski met with several key White House officials to deliver a single, consistent message on how they should address the administration’s unfinished environmental and energy business.

“You have been bold and aggressive so far. Don’t slow down at all now,” Karpinski told them. “This will be our last chance to make progress for four years. Be bold.”

They were pushing on an open door. President Obama and his top aides, who have ushered through an increasingly ambitious set of energy and environmental policies during his second term, have decided to flood the zone during his remaining couple of months in office. For months, they had envisioned finalizing a set of regulations and other executive actions that would set the stage for Hillary Clinton’s presidency; now they face the prospect of a Republican successor who has vowed to revive the U.S. fossil fuel industry and eliminate two regulations for every one he adopts.

Obama, who noted a week after the election that the federal government “is not a speedboat, it’s an ocean liner,” is determined to shift its trajectory as far to the left as possible before Donald Trump takes office in January. In many cases, that means exerting every federal lever still available to promote renewable energy, restrict drilling and coal extraction, and safeguard a handful of prized landscapes in the western United States.

Within the span of just two weeks after the election, the administration issued a series of key policies aimed at cementing environmental gains. It issued a for offshore oil and gas drilling that halts such decisions in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas off Alaska, as well as in waters off the southeast Atlantic Coast. The administration also aimed at curbing accidental methane releases from oil and gas drilling on federal and tribal lands. Officials estimate the new methane rule—which compels reductions in gas flaring, more leak inspections, and the installation of new equipment in some operations—will cut annual emissions of the heat-trapping gas by 175,000 to 180,000 tons.

The Department of Justice also with Devon Energy that cancels 15 leases in the Badger-Two Medicine area of the Lewis and Clark National Forest in Montana, near Glacier National Park. The leases, which were initially leased under Ronald Reagan and have not been developed, had been the subject of a protracted legal dispute because the area is home to the creation story of the Blackfeet tribe and is close to the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area. And on December 4, the it would consider an alternate route for the $3.7 billion Dakota Access pipeline, which the Standing Rock tribe in North Dakota protested out of concern that the pipeline could pollute the tribe’s drinking water supplies and threaten sacred sites.

On the other side of the ledger, the Interior Department  just two days after the election that aims to expand wind and solar development on Bureau of Land Management–owned land by streamlining the permitting process and providing financial incentives for firms to bid on areas that have the best potential for generation capacity and the fewest conflicts with imperiled species.

“We don’t think about these decisions in the here and now. We’re thinking about it for generations forward,” Interior Secretary Sally Jewell explained to an audience at Georgetown University on November 29.

Republicans—who will control both chambers of Congress as well as the White House—have threatened to overturn some of these rules, especially those that restrict coal, oil, and gas exploration. While it takes at least a year to rewrite a regulation and even longer to overhaul a five-year leasing plan, the rules Obama has issued since June can be reversed under the , a 1996 law that has been used successfully just once in its 20-year history, to overturn an ergonomics rule adopted in 2001, at the very end of President Clinton’s second term. Under the law, the House and Senate can overturn a rule by a majority vote within 60 legislative days if the president signs the resolution of disapproval into law, and given the current congressional schedule, lawmakers will have several months to jettison Obama’s regulations even after he’s left office. Senator John Barrasso (R-Wyoming), who has frequently criticized the president’s energy and environmental policies, has already said, “We plan to use that technique vigorously in the next administration.”

Obama doesn’t seem too worried about these threats. Asked about it during a press conference on November 20, while traveling in Lima, Peru, he replied, “That’s their prerogative,” but “I feel very strongly these are the right things to do, and I’m going to make sure I do them.”

That means environmental advocates—who confess to going through alternating phases of deep depression and panic in recent weeks—are working doggedly to secure as many victories as they can over the next few weeks while they still have easy access to the Oval Office. Some of the as-yet-uncompleted actions are piecemeal regulations, such as Environmental Protection Agency standards aimed at preventing accidental chemical releases that haven’t been updated for a quarter century, a stream protection rule, and tighter energy efficiency standards for appliances ranging from furnaces to commercial boilers.

But others have a more overarching theme, such as protections for sacred Native American sites across the country. The Dakota Access pipeline decision and the recent settlement with Devon both fall under this category and have cheered the tribal-environmental alliance that elevated these issues to national prominence. Now attention has shifted to sites such as , a site in southeastern Utah that contains ancient Pueblo petroglyphs and other archeological treasures that remains vulnerable to looting and vandalism.

Five tribal nations have joined together to ask Obama to designate Bears Ears a national monument under the 1906 Antiquities Act and are seeking to manage a proposed 1.9 million-acre swath of land along with federal authorities. Many environmental groups have joined in the effort, arguing the move would safeguard a public resource and serve as an important precedent for tribal-federal relations.

“I think there’s a huge opportunity for President Obama to right historic wrongs by addressing the rights and welfare of sovereign tribal nations by answering their call to protect their sacred lands and waters,” said ’s Jamie Williams in an interview.

Nearly every elected state and federal official in Utah—including Rob Bishop, who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee, and Jason Chaffetz, who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee—oppose unilateral action by the president and have introduced legislation that would protect a portion of Bears Ears while opening other parts of the state to development. Administration officials are currently looking at making a national monument designation but scaling back the size from the tribes’ original proposal in an effort to respond to Utah officials’ concerns.

Obama has shown an increasing willingness to use his authority under the Antiquities Act to protect areas of historic, cultural, and ecological importance—only Franklin D. Roosevelt has used it more often—and Bears Ears is not the only place Obama is probably going to single out for attention. A pair of civil rights sites in Birmingham and Anniston, Alabama, are likely to make the list to commemorate the 1963 bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church and the 1961 attack on a group of Freedom Riders, respectively. And 6,200 acres in Humboldt, Santa Cruz, and San Luis Obispo Counties in California will likely be added to the existing California Coastal National Monument.

Then there’s Gold Butte, a dramatic stretch of Mojave Desert and sagebrush steppe that includes fossilized sand dunes, ancient Native American etchings, and critical habitat for the threatened desert tortoise. It is also home to Cliven Bundy and his family, who have challenged BLM officials’ authority to patrol the region despite the fact that it’s the agency’s land. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) has spent decades working to protect and has personally appealed to Obama to create a monument before they both leave office.

“This land belongs to all of us, but that hasn’t stopped radicals and far-right voices from fighting to use public lands like Gold Butte for their own selfish interests,” Reid said in a statement to șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű. “President Obama has the authority to protect Gold Butte, and I hope he will. I will continue pushing to make this happen for as long as it takes.”

While some environmentalists worry that an aggressive use of the Antiquities Act at the end of Obama’s term could prompt Congress to try to amend the law, that fight might happen anyway.

Bishop is already lobbying Trump to overturn not only some monuments designated by Obama but also sites Clinton declared two decades ago. The law surrounding such moves are murky: In 1938, the U.S. Attorney General wrote a formal opinion saying that the Antiquities Act authorized a president to establish a monument but did not grant a president the right to take one away. But that concept has not been tested in court. In a couple instances, presidents have shrunk the boundaries of a previous president’s proclamations. While that has happened only a few times, such as when Woodrow Wilson cut the acreage of the Mount Olympus National Monument, former Interior Department Solicitor General John Leshy noted in an email, “That’s not been tested in court either.”

What is clear is that Congress can alter the boundaries of a monument or rescind it altogether. And most activists are gearing up for the barrage of defensive battles they will have to wage once they’re facing a GOP-controlled executive and legislative branch.

Andrew Rosenberg, who directs the Union of Concerned Scientists’ , said many are “nervous” about what they might face under Trump, and it is difficult to determine how many measures the president-elect intends to roll back. “I’m not looking forward to spending this portion of my career defending things that I thought no longer needed to be defended, because of the significance they hold for public health and the environment,” Rosenberg said.

But Williams said that his community must take this moment to form new alliances with social justice groups to enlist broader support for the goals it already holds. “It’s time to build a movement,” he said.

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In a campaign season dominated by sex tapes and Twitter insults, wonky questions surrounding the price of carbon or what to do about our public lands haven’t gotten much airtime—particularly during the first two presidential debates. But few issues underscore the wide chasm between the Republican and Democratic presidential nominees more than the environment.

These are the issues that will help define the next president’s first term, and the distance between the personal beliefs and policy proposals of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is worth exploring. We did our best to extrapolate Trump’s vision from his various public comments (it wasn’t easy). With Clinton, who aims to expand on the ambitious environmental policies championed by President Obama, the picture is clearer: she’s going to be aggressive.

Here’s a breakdown of what Clinton hopes to accomplish if she wins the Oval Office, and what it means. 

Climate Change and Renewable Energy

In contrast to Obama, who barely mentioned the issue when he was running for reelection in 2012, Clinton has made tackling climate change a major theme in her campaign. She’s mentioned it during both the primary and general election debates, mocking Trump during the first debate by saying, “Donald thinks that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. I think it's real.” Trump replied, “I did not. I did not. I do not say that.” (He actually , and he has also questioned whether global warming is even underway.) 

Clinton has by as much as 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, and 80 percent by mid-century. She’s also pledged to cut U.S. oil consumption by a third, ensure that half a billion solar panels will be installed by 2020, and carry out a ten-fold increase in renewable energy production on public lands. On top of that, she aims to provide $60 billion to state and city officials through a “clean energy challenge fund” so they can reduce their carbon output and enhance their resilience to climate impacts, along with another $30 billion to struggling coal communities. 

Such ideas make Clinton attractive to environmentalists. “It’s probably fair to say that, by the time his term is over, President Obama will be regarded as the most environmental president we’ve ever seen, and yet we’re confident Secretary Clinton will build on this record, and even do more,” says League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski, whose group is pouring $10 million into the presidential race this cycle.

Clinton’s 2020 overall emissions target is more aggressive than what Obama has pledged under the Paris climate agreement. Her solar plan, for example, suggests that the U.S. will have 140 gigawatts of installed solar by the end of 2020, compared to the 100 gigawatts that’s now projected. But the question of whether she can deliver on her promises remains—especially since she has yet to embrace the idea of imposing a sweeping carbon tax, and it’s unlikely that Congress would hand over tens of billions of dollars to her administration if she’s elected. While Clinton has vowed to defend federal regulations limiting the carbon output of existing power plants, which are currently being challenged in court, she will have to do much more than that in order to meet her professed goals. 

Clinton’s aides point to a few federal levers that Obama has not yet pulled, such as generating as much as 12 gigawatts in hydropower from inactive Army Corps of Engineers dams and spurring municipalities to shorten their permitting process. But Joseph E. Aldy, an associate professor of public policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, wrote a critique of Clinton’s overall approach in the , outlining how inefficient it can be to add on incremental incentive programs for cutting emissions when others are already in place. Such moves could disproportionately impact poor Americans, he noted, or increase overall costs. “To drive the innovation necessary to realize the long-term goal and to attain it in a cost-effective manner requires an economy-wide price on carbon,” he concluded.

Republicans, for their part, have accused Clinton of waging “a war on coal,” pointing to her own on how she plans to expand clean energy in Appalachia and elsewhere “because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right?” Scott Segal, a partner at the law firm Bracewell LLP who represents energy companies, some of which burn coal, says that Clinton’s record as a senator suggests she might be more consensus-oriented than her campaign rhetoric implies. “This approach to the legislative branch suggests the potential for a more pragmatic approach to a range of environmental issues,” Segal says. “She may focus on a few key priorities in this space and allow for cooperation elsewhere.”

Conservation on Public Lands and in Federal Waters

On this front, Clinton has staked out one position to the left of Obama—she opposes offshore oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean and off the Atlantic Coast—and is pushing for a doubling of the outdoor recreation economy within a decade. The Democratic nominee has vowed to unlock access to at least 2 million acres of currently inaccessible public lands by the end of her first term, and to revitalize more than 3,000 city parks within ten years. Like Obama, Clinton says she will work to increase recognition of communities of color, women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans among national parks, monuments and memorials.

Amy Roberts, executive director of the Outdoor Industry Association, says the fact that Clinton has vowed to double the outdoor economy marks the first time a presidential candidate has talked about her industry “in a distinct way,” rather than just as side benefit of conserving public lands. And former U.S. Senator Mark Udall (D-CO), who spoke on Clinton’s behalf to the OIA’s annual conference in September, wrote in an email that, “There is only one thoughtful vote to cast for president in this election. Hillary Clinton.”

Clinton’s call for a halt to offshore drilling in the Arctic—a step that environmentalists have been seeking for years—has attracted little attention. Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, declined to comment on Clinton directly, but wrote in an email, “We need an informed energy policy where we can learn about the potential resources in the Atlantic and Arctic. Expanding our offshore oil and natural gas development to new areas is critical to our nation’s long-term energy security.”

Wildlife

Though wildlife trafficking is far from a top-tier political issue, it’s been a priority of Clinton’s for some time. “I am a Democrat, but I really like elephants,” she remarked during a taping of The Ellen DeGeneres Show in May. According to David Hayes, who served as deputy secretary of the Interior under both Obama and Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton became interested in elephants during a trip to Africa with her daughter while serving as First Lady. She pushed Obama to sign an executive order to combat wildlife trafficking in July 2013, and helped establish a non-governmental group—the Elephants Action Network—through the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative. “Every time I see her, she asks me, ‘How are the elephants?’ he recalled. 

Environmental Justice

You can sum up why Clinton has made the topic of environmental justice so prominent in her campaign in a single word: Flint. The lead contamination crisis in that largely black Michigan city commanded national attention this election cycle, and Clinton has invoked it repeatedly as an example of policymakers failing to pay enough attention to communities of color. 

She has promised to eliminate lead as a major public health threat within five years, modernize the nation’s drinking and wastewater systems, reduce urban air pollution, and establish an Environmental and Climate Justice Task Force to ensure that federal decisions take account of the cumulative impacts vulnerable communities face when it comes to pollution. 

“There are a lot of Flints across our country where children are exposed to polluted air, unhealthy water and chemicals that can increase cancer risk. And like Flint, they tend to be places that are home to poor people and people of color,” Clinton . “Every child and every family in America deserves clean air to breathe, clean water to drink and a safe and healthy place to live. This a justice issue. It’s a civil rights issue. And as president, it will be a national priority for us.”

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IT TOOK THREE months for Congress to pass a bill aimed at helping East Coast residents cope with the impact of Sandy, and it will take at least eight times that long to spend it. Unlike many emergency-spending bills—which get loaded up with extraneous provisions, ranging from federal subsidies to tax breaks—the $50.5 billion measure approved in late January guides recovery efforts by designating funds to specific missions. But does that mean all the money is being spent wisely? Not entirely.

First, it’s worth noting that funding under the Disaster Relief Appropriations Act of 2013 is separate from the National Flood Insurance Program, which has now paid out $7.7 billion on 143,000 Sandy-related claims. Up and down the coast, almost anyone with a home who got federal flood insurance to obtain a mortgage has been compensated, at taxpayer expense.

For years the program has allowed Americans to live in flood-prone areas by subsidizing their insurance rates. Although lawmakers recently made some reforms, the program still makes it cheaper and easier for homeowners to live in regions that will face future disasters.

In terms of the relief bill itself, the government shaved $2.5 billion off the supplemental bill through the mandatory, across-the-board budget cuts known as sequestration. As a result, the measure’s grand total stands at $47,994,808,108. The money isn’t coming out all at once: as of August 1, the federal government had issued $9.1 billion, less than 19 percent of the total amount.

From early expenditures, it appears clear that the money has cushioned the storm’s blow for many East Coast residents. The Federal Emergency Management Administration provided disaster assistance to 182,800 individuals at a cost of more than $1.4 billion. (Of those receiving aid, much of which went to rental insurance and home repairs, 64 percent live in New York and 34 percent in New Jersey.) The Agriculture Department had spent $6.2 million by August 1, with the bulk of that going to purchase food for soup kitchens and food banks and a portion funding efforts by farmers and ranchers to rehabilitate and repair farmland, watersheds, and floodplains. Most of the measure’s biggest expenditures will take climate change into account but won’t radically alter coastal development.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development will provide $15.2 billion in Community Development Block Grants, meaning state and local officials will determine where the money winds up. The government has given out $5.4 bilion so far, which was more or less evenly divided among New York State, New York City, and New Jersey. So far it’s gone mainly to homeowners and small businesses doing repairs; later it will pay for everything from hardening the region’s grid to restoring dunes.

Bottom line: federal officials are prodding the states to take factors such as more severe storms and rising sea levels into account when rebuilding, but they will be rebuilding on the coasts all the same.

Juliet Eilperin is a White House correspondent for The Washington Post.

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Interview Issue 2012: Why Has ‘Environment’ Become a Dirty Word?

When it comes to hot-button election issues, pity the environment. It often serves as fodder for one-liners during the presidential-primary season, and this year is no exception. Almost every Republican candidate has questioned whether human activity is fueling climate change—the idea is “patently absurd,” said former Pennsylvania senator —and all of them have pushed for extracting fossil-fuel energy faster than we’re doing now. The GOP nominee, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, backs the proposed 1,179-mile Keystone XL pipeline to ship heavy crude from Alberta to Nebraska and has declared that “we don’t know what’s causing climate change,” backpedaling from earlier statements that it’s both real and man-made. As for , he has suggested that, in the coming months, he will be “clear in voicing my belief that we’re going to have to take further steps to deal with climate change in a serious way,” but he has also repeatedly boasted that domestic oil production is higher than at any point in the past eight years. Is there any way to return the environment to the political stage as a subject worthy of debate? șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű asked experts across the ideological spectrum what advice they’d give the candidates as they head into the fall campaign season. The only question remaining is whether they will listen.

• You Can’t Argue With Efficiency
• Focus on Common Values
• Get Out of the Climate Business
• Attack Obama’s Green Record
• It’s the Weather, Stupid
• Don’t Mention Polar Bears
• Put Children First
• Stop Playing Ostrich

Environmental Advice for the Candidates From William K. Reilly

EPA administrator under George H.W. Bush and co-chairman of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling

YOU CAN’T ARGUE WITH EFFICIENCY
I’d say to the candidate: “America’s energy output is increasing, and its imports are declining—a much desired new trend. We can drive that progress faster if we accelerate energy efficiency—better-insulated buildings, lighter cars, more efficient lighting, more wind power—and it all leads toward energy independence and less reliance on other countries. We can also learn from Chicago, which is preparing for hotter, drier summers and wetter winters with better hospital facilities for heatstroke victims, plants and trees suitable to the changing climate, water-permeable pavement, and green roofs. What’s not to like about efficiency, wind power, and planting trees for the warmer climate much of the country is already experiencing?”

Environmental Advice for the Candidates From Gale Norton

Secretary of the Interior under George W. Bush and president of Norton Regulatory Strategies

FOCUS ON COMMON VALUES
We need to separate bureaucracy from overarching values. Protecting the environment doesn’t have to mean loving red tape. We should explore ways to replace litigation and punitive enforcement with collaborative problem solving, encourage innovative technologies, and harness market mechanisms like the acid-rain emissions-trading program. By focusing on ways of making regulation more cost-effective and user-friendly for jobs and communities, we make it easier to eventually address more controversial issues like climate change. Common sense and ingenuity will further both America’s economy and its environment. 

Environmental Advice for the Candidates From Jenny Beth Martin

Cofounder and national coordinator of Tea Party Patriots

GET OUT OF THE CLIMATE BUSINESS
With high gas prices, the left will campaign for more green policies and for mandates on the auto industry and other businesses that claim the solution to this crisis is energy-efficient products. The American people know these mandates mean more costs to them and more time-consuming regulations. The result, as it always is when government overextends its constitutional role, is lost businesses and jobs. That is the last thing Americans want to hear.

My suggestion to the candidates—especially Romney, who supported cap-and-trade legislation—is to get government out of the business of dictating unproven energy policies and get back to developing policy that will rein in government spending and balance the budget. The reason climate change is a nonstarter is that it means more government regulation and less freedom, pushing a political agenda and not sound fiscal policy, which is the only way to solve our economic problems. 

Environmental Advice for the Candidates From James M. Inhofe

Republican senator from Oklahoma and ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee

ATTACK OBAMA’S GREEN RECORD
With the election coming up, President Obama will be running as far away from his global-warming record as possible. Look for Governor Romney to shine the spotlight on Obama’s decision to veto the Keystone pipeline, the costly regulations that fulfill his campaign promise that energy prices would “necessarily skyrocket” on American families, the failure of his green-energy economy with the collapse of , and his continued war on affordable energy, which seeks to eliminate the production of America’s most abundant natural resources. Obama knows the public is outraged by his agenda, which has done little to nothing for the environment, destroys jobs, and raises gas and electricity prices. Don’t expect him to defend his record but to run away from it and deflect blame.

Environmental Advice for the Candidates From Bill McKibben

Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, author, and cofounder of 350.org

IT’S THE WEATHER, STUPID
If I were a candidate, I’d focus on the crazy weather—something everyone is noticing and something that surveys suggest a large majority of Americans link to climate change. I’d talk about how the greed of the fossil-fuel industry is starting to disrupt the planet’s weather, and then I’d point out that we’re paying them billions of dollars in subsidies, kind of a bonus for the wrecking crew. My message would be: let’s spend money on solar and wind instead. Because you know the reason the big guys really hate solar panels? You can’t meter the sun.

Environmental Advice for the Candidates From Paul Begala

CNN commentator, Democratic political consultant, and Priorities USA Action adviser

DON’T MENTION POLAR BEARS
Swing voters are people environmentalists rather than species environmentalists. We all care about fuzzy animals—nobody wants the polar bears to drown. But in the main, when we find that swing voters can be persuaded on environmental policy, it’s on people issues: clean air, clean water, pollution.

Obama has been blessed by his enemies. The people financing the attacks on him are really bad on people issues like clean air. I do think this can be an issue, and it will be. They’re trying to kill any clean-energy economy Obama is working to create because of their oil businesses. It’s just a business deal for them: they invest millions to elect Mitt Romney, and they reap billions from their businesses. It’s a straight-up return on investment.

So that’s what the election will be about—campaign ads will be more about air and water, not an American Indian with a tear running down his cheek.

Environmental Advice for the Candidates From Van Jones

Cofounder of Rebuild the Dream, former White House special adviser on green jobs, and author of The Green Collar Economy

PUT CHILDREN FIRST
If the GOP attempts to score cheap points by attacking the EPA, Obama should punch back hard. The agency has probably saved more American lives over the past 40 years than the . A bipartisan creation of the Nixon administration, the agency has policed polluters and curbed deadly toxic chemicals in our air and water. Many in the GOP try to paint these protections as job killers, but the poisons that the agency is keeping out of our bodies are people killers. 

If Romney uses the job-killer line, Obama should simply say, “We all care about jobs. But we also care about our children. Everyone here can agree that we have a duty to protect our kids from known poisons, right? So tell me, Governor: How many American children are you willing to sacrifice for one job? How many American kids are you willing to see die per job created? How many funerals are you willing to go to? Because if you remove all those protections to get rid of the so-called job killers, you open the floodgates for known people killers. And I believe we can create good jobs in America without doing that to our kids.” 

Environmental Advice for the Candidates From Douglas Brinkley

Rice University history professor and author of The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America

STOP PLAYING OSTRICH
History will show that we live in an age of global warming when nearly all of our politicians played ostrich, burying their heads in the sand rather than weaning America off fossil fuels. Political cowardice is the poison in the body politic. We need to prioritize the climate crisis and fight to save such vanishing wilderness as the Everglades and Arctic Alaska.

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WITH HIS BEARD and tweedy jacket, Richard Lindzen looks like a cheerful physics professor from the fifties, inspiring nostalgia for the age of space exploration and other grand, forward-looking American endeavors. On a cold March evening in New London, Connecticut, the 67-year-old atmospheric scientist from MIT is trying to serve up a little optimism about the gloomiest topic of our time: global warming.

Richard Lindzen

Richard Lindzen

Inconvenient Expert

Optimism? Yeah, as in: Don’t worry about a thing. Just now, Lindzen is scoffing at the widely accepted view that CO2 buildup is to blame for the heat waves, prolonged droughts, and intense hurricanes that the U.S. and other countries have experienced in recent years. At a time when much of the nation’s political, intellectual, and business leadership accepts the idea that people are the cause of global warming, Lindzen loudly disagrees.

“All scientific issues—and this is no different—are difficult to understand,” he tells a group of cadets and locals assembled in an auditorium at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy. “Extreme weather events are always present. There’s no evidence it’s getting better, or worse, or changing.”

Lindzen’s relaxed delivery gives the audience a comfortable sense that they, like him, are smart enough to question the pronouncements of nervous scientists and high-octane advocates like Al Gore. Skepticism is a good idea, he says, since so many people who sound off about global warming don’t bother to read the documents that supposedly forecast climate apocalypse. “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, if you read it—and no one does …” he says, and that phrase alone prompts laughter.

This ability to put people at ease helps explain why, after nearly two decades of effort, Lindzen has achieved exalted status among the current crop of global-warming doubters. He has personally briefed President Bush’s top science adviser on climate change and is very popular with senior GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill. He publishes opinion pieces in The Wall Street Journal and speaks publicly several times a month, both in the U.S. and abroad. With so many Americans searching for answers on climate change, an endowed MIT professor with pithy quotes offers a level of assurance that few can rival.

In doing so, however, Lindzen is challenging the scientific establishment, which tends to sing in scary harmony about this issue. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an international scientific body, 2,500 researchers strong, that weighs in on the planet’s climate health every five years or so. Earlier this year, the IPCC rolled out a series of three massive documents asserting that global warming is an established fact and outlining where it all will lead.

The reports maintain that there’s more than a 90 percent chance that human activity—primarily the burning of fossil fuels, resulting in increased levels of atmospheric CO2—is responsible for the earth’s recent warming, which amounts to a 1.2-degree-Fahrenheit rise in global mean temperature over the past 100 years. Noting that the current atmospheric concentration of CO2 is higher than it’s been in the past 650,000 years, the IPCC predicts that human-induced climate change could spell extinction for 20 to 30 percent of the world’s species by the end of this century, cause increasingly destructive weather patterns, and flood coastal cities.

Lindzen doesn’t dispute that the planet has warmed up in the past three decades, but he argues that human-generated CO2 accounts for no more than 30 percent of this temperature rise. Much of the warming, he says, stems from fluctuations in temperature that have occurred for millions of years—explained by complicated natural changes in equilibrium between the oceans and the atmosphere—and the latest period of warming will not result in catastrophe.

Whether such arguments are true, false, or nuts, they seem to make an impression on the Coast Guard crowd. Edward Hug, a Massachusetts retiree who came to hear Lindzen speak, is exactly the kind of person the professor wants to sway. Hug, who used to work in underwater acoustics for the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, says he’s been diligently trying to educate himself about global warming.

“I’ve seen Al Gore’s film twice, but I’ve also read Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, which makes a compelling case on the other side,” says Hug, referring to the controversial 2004 novel in which Crichton—using scientific arguments that were hotly challenged by critics—ridiculed the global-warming consensus as the work of conspiratorial alarmists.

Hug sees the IPCC as “the closest thing to a gold standard when it comes to science,” but he still wants to know whether Americans have to change their lifestyles radically in order to save the planet. “The question is,” he said earlier as he settled in to hear Lindzen, “is it worth making the sacrifice?”

By evening’s end, he decides to join the skeptical camp. “I find him very convincing,” Hug says of Lindzen, recalling how he invoked scientific data and theories to buttress his points. “He’s just as good as Michael Crichton.”

SOMETIMES THE AMERICAN people seem convinced that global warming means everything has to change; sometimes they don’t. An April poll conducted by The Washington Post, ABC News, and Stanford University showed that 70 percent of U.S. voters think the government should take action to ward off climate change. But even though 84 percent of the poll’s respondents said they believed the world’s temperature has been rising over the past century, only four in ten said they are “extremely” or “very” sure it is happening.

Meanwhile, in late May, President Bush vowed to alter his hands-off attitude about climate change, announcing that the U.S. would lead talks among the world’s largest greenhouse-gas producers in an effort to reach a new accord before he leaves office. But whether he will follow through on that remains to be seen. As for the rest of us, how about all those Live Earth concerts? Did they inspire you to change anything other than your TV channel?

In recent months, Lindzen’s circle of allies has appeared to be expanding rather than shrinking. In late May, Michael Griffin, administrator of NASA, which conducts considerable amounts of climate research, told National Public Radio that he was not sure climate change was “a problem we must wrestle with” and that it was “rather arrogant” to suggest that the climate we have now represents the best possible set of conditions. Alexander Cockburn, a maverick journalist who leans left on most topics, lambasted the global-warming consensus last spring on the political Web site CounterPunch.org, arguing that there’s no evidence yet that humans are causing the rise in global temperature. Other skeptics include Czech Republic president VĂĄclav Klaus; Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville; and Patrick J. Michaels, a senior fellow in environmental studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.

Cockburn based much of his article on the work of Martin Hertzberg, a consultant from Copper Mountain, Colorado, who worked as a U.S. Navy meteorologist for three years. According to Hertzberg, the increase in CO2 is happening because the world’s oceans are warming up—a natural process that’s been occurring since the end of the most recent ice age, 12,000 years ago—and in doing so they’re releasing their dissolved carbon into the atmosphere.

Most climate experts react harshly to such backtalk. Sir John Houghton, a British atmospheric physicist who chaired the IPCC’s Scientific Assessment Working Group from 1988 to 2002, says skeptics have conducted a “misinformation campaign” in the U.S. that must be brought to an end. Earlier this year, Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman hurled one of the worst insults imaginable at the skeptics’ camp. “I would like to say we’re at a point where global warming is impossible to deny,” she wrote in February. “Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.”

This sort of declaration, understandably, makes global-warming skeptics feel persecuted. Lindzen lost almost all of his father’s family and most of his mother’s to the Holocaust, and he says he considers Goodman’s comments “mostly stupid, and a bit disgusting as well.”

Other skeptics argue that the normal processes of scientific debate—gathering and analyzing data in order to make a case for a particular set of ideas—are getting pushed aside with this issue, leading to dangerous groupthink about how best to prepare for the future.

Danish writer BjĂžrn Lomborg underscores this point in his new book, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming. Though he agrees that global warming is happening and that human-generated CO2 is a contributing factor, Lomborg questions whether “hysteria and headlong spending on extravagant CO2-cutting programs at an unprecedented price is the only possible response.”

The skeptics’ campaign has drawn fire from some of the nation’s top scientists, who say their problem with Lindzen and other doubters is simple: They’re wrong. Lindzen’s critics say his dissent consists of taking cynical potshots at the consensus model of global warming and that he chooses to pick his fights before general audiences who don’t understand the science.

“He is treating this issue like a smart defense attorney,” says John Holdren, a prominent environmental scientist and past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “He’s trying to get his guilty client off. Dick’s guilty client is the proposition that the human impacts on global climate are dangerous.”

Senator Barbara Boxer, an influential California Democrat who chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee, is just as critical of Lindzen. “The world’s leading scientists are saying we know enough to act now,” she says. “If, in the past, we had listened to a small number of skeptics, we wouldn’t have addressed dirty air or endangered species or toxic-waste sites, and our quality of life would have suffered greatly.

“It would be irresponsible,” she adds, “to let a few skeptics stand in the way of doing what we need to do to stabilize the world’s climate.”

LINDZEN DOESN’T MIND getting bashed—the criticism bolsters his sense that he’s fighting for the truth. “I feel that my field is being raped, and someone should do something about it,” he says.

John M. Wallace, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington who has known Lindzen since their grad-school days in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says Lindzen’s challenge to climate-change orthodoxy is driven, in large part, by his inner resistance to backing down. “That is Dick’s natural personality—to be somewhat of a contrarian,” Wallace says. “He feels he can work the argument and win.”

Lindzen is also accustomed to charting his own course and trusting what his brain seems to tell him. Raised in the Bronx by immigrant parents, Lindzen graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1956, started college at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, then transferred to Harvard after two years, graduating in 1960 with a bachelor’s degree in physics. He didn’t intend to specialize in climatology when he stayed at Harvard to pursue a graduate degree, but he won a fellowship in atmospheric and ocean science that allowed him to continue studying his first love: applied mathematics and physics.

Early on, Lindzen’s exceptional math skills helped shape his career. For a series of papers he published in the late sixties and early seventies, he chose to tackle a complex phenomenon involving thermal currents in the atmosphere that scientists had been trying to explain for decades. “Lindzen figured out how to mathematically solve the problem,” says Wallace. In 1977, this work helped get Lindzen elected to both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded an endowed professorship at MIT in 1983.

In 1990, two years after NASA scientist James E. Hansen issued his now famous warning about climate change during a congressional hearing, Lindzen started taking a publicly contrarian stance when he challenged then-senator Gore by suggesting in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society that the case for human-induced global warming was overstated and that natural climate variability could explain things just as easily. In 1992, he served up similar arguments at a Vienna conference on the science and economics of global warming that was hosted by OPEC and marked by unruly protests from environmentalists.

Lindzen tends to relate these stories with mild sarcasm, implying that the listener is surely sophisticated enough to perceive his opponents’ foibles. “They were actually trying to climb in the building,” he recalls in a deadpan tone. “It was kind of strange, but these were Europeans.”

Lindzen’s critiques usually focus on how current climate models can’t explain everything and how their proponents conveniently ignore facts that don’t fit their assumptions. He points out, for example, that there’s been a period of global cooling since the 18th-century onset of the Industrial Revolution—from the 1940s to the 1960s—and that average temperatures rose in Europe between 1050 and 1300, even though there was no heavy industry going on back then.

At the moment, Lindzen is pursuing a theory that says increased amounts of water vapor—from warming surface temperatures—will reduce heat-trapping high-cirrus clouds, which will help balance the planet’s temperature. This concept is significant, because most climate scientists believe water vapor will exacerbate the warming effect of greenhouse gases. Lindzen and some scientists at NASA have offered a hypothesis that warming in the tropics will reduce high-cirrus cloudiness there, which will increase outgoing heat more than it increases the heating effect of incoming sunlight. While this theory has sparked serious academic debate, most experts took a pass after a group of researchers criticized it in a 2002 paper for the Journal of Climate.

Stanford University climatologist Stephen H. Schneider, who helped write an important chapter of the IPCC report on global warming’s potential impact, has debated Lindzen frequently in academic forums and compares his critique to the traditional scientific method of Karl Popper, which involves testing a theory by looking for flaws. But Lindzen has gone too far, Schneider says, because, given the complexity of the subject, it makes no sense to focus on a few unexplained aspects of human-induced warming when the overwhelming indicators—along with current temperature and weather patterns—suggest that the theory is right.

Schneider recognizes that global warming may not wreak catastrophic change—in fact, he puts the chances at roughly 50-50. But given those odds, he argues, we’re better off acting as if catastrophic warming is a 100 percent lock. “The chance of an asteroid hitting the planet is one in a hundred million, so we don’t worry about that,” he says. “Significant climate change is a coin flip, so we do.”

Many critics don’t give Lindzen as much credit as Schneider does, suggesting that he’s a tool for Big Oil. In 1995, Ross Gelbspan, writing in Harper’s, pointed out that in 1991 Lindzen testified before Congress as an expert witness and that the Western Fuels Association, an industry group, paid his trip expenses to Washington.

While Lindzen did accept the expenses, this doesn’t mean he’s on anybody’s payroll. He charges for his speeches, but so do prominent scientists who disagree with him about climate change. (Lindzen gets between $5,000 and $10,000 for speaking to a corporate group and between $1,000 and $2,000 for noncorporate gigs like the Coast Guard Academy appearance.) As his friend Wallace would attest, his main motive is conviction. He’s sure he’s right, and he revels in his contrary ways.

This is, after all, a chain smoker who thinks the evidence linking secondhand smoke to lung cancer is iffy. With a wife and two grown sons, he lives the classic, comfortable life of a New England professor, residing in a wooden clapboard house in Newton, Massachusetts, filled with shelves crammed with books and LPs of classical music, opera, jazz, folk, and musical comedy. He remained a Democrat until 1991, even as he questioned whether global warming mattered, switching to the GOP only after many prominent Democrats had excoriated him.

Lindzen doesn’t have any use for most environmentalists, and even when he does something “green,” he sniffs at the idea that he’s following their lead. He uses compact fluorescent lightbulbs in many of his lamps at home but emphasizes, “It’s not to save the world. It’s to save on our electric bills.”

LINDZEN’S ACTIVISM HAS earned him plaudits from conservative politicians like Senator James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who has labeled global warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” Inhofe has hailed Lindzen for presenting “a clear and coherent scientific counter to unfounded climate alarmism.”

Lindzen’s professional colleagues have been less kind, and there’s no doubt that climate-change believers are aggressive proselytizers. But Lindzen insists that scientists cannot say precisely what the future holds, because they’re just beginning to analyze some of the more complicated responses to climate change, such as how quickly ice sheets melt and to what extent this will raise sea levels. To him, these uncertainties are the heart of the matter, and they’re why he feels justified about voicing dissent.

While the two sides differ on a number of questions, the debate really comes down to one thing: whether the warming we’ve begun to see poses a pressing problem or is something the world can adapt to over the long haul. According to Kalee Kreider, a spokeswoman for Al Gore, it is this question, more than any other, that embodies the difference between Lindzen and the former vice president.

“Where [Lindzen] disagrees is the issue of urgency,” she says. “We just feel he’s out of step with the mainstream scientific community.”

To some extent, Lindzen has enjoyed success in getting his message out. The Washington Post/ABC/Stanford poll found that, while 70 percent of respondents want the U.S. government to do more to address climate change, 56 percent believe the academic community remains divided on the issue.

Meanwhile, book sales and TV ratings seem to indicate that global-warming skepticism is finding an audience. The Great Global Warming Swindle, a recent documentary featuring Lindzen and other skeptics, attracted 2.5 million viewers in Britain, prompting the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to buy the international rights so they could air it this summer.

The market is currently awash in books that, like Lomborg’s Cool It, attack the majority view—including Crichton’s novel, Christopher C. Horner’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism, and Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, by Dennis T. Avery and S. Fred Singer.

Chris Rapley, who directs the British Antarctic Survey, watches the success of what he calls “the professional confusers” with horror: After the documentary aired in Britain, the mother of one of his most talented ice-core analysts called her son to make sure he was certain climate change was really a problem. The film skewed key facts, Rapley said, but its real power lay in the fact that it appealed to people who don’t want to think they’re helping usher in an era of environmental disaster. “It’s a message people wanted to hear,” he says.

But while Lindzen and his allies are competitive in the marketplace of ideas, they’re losing in America’s cloakrooms and boardrooms. Democrats, who control Congress, aim to pass legislation in the coming months that will impose the same regulatory scheme that Lindzen opposes, a cap on CO2 emissions. And a host of traditional foes of such government-driven fixes, including the Big Three automakers and ConocoPhillips, now endorse it.

The 2008 election may determine whether Lindzen will continue to have a meaningful role in the public debate over climate change. If any of the Democratic candidates wins, Lindzen will be sidelined even further, since all of them are prepared to regulate emissions. The GOP field remains mostly in lockstep on the issue: John McCain backs mandatory cuts in greenhouse gases, but the remaining Republican candidates are much less enthusiastic about the prospect of such massive regulation.

Even more telling, though, is the attitude of businessmen, who increasingly see the wisdom of investing in CO2-mitigation strategies. Last winter in Miami, during a private meeting convened by an outfit called the Tudor Investment Corporation, more than a hundred portfolio managers gathered at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel to hear opposing speeches from Lindzen and Schneider on whether to factor global warming into investment decisions.

The two men separately made their case. Lindzen told the group that future warming wouldn’t be dire. But when Schneider spoke, he appealed to the audience on blunt economic grounds. Catastrophic climate change, he argued, amounted to the kind of “low-probability, high-consequence risk” that investors usually seek to avoid. Tudor analysts could make their own decisions about whether he or Lindzen would end up being right, he added, and that decision would have huge financial consequences.

“I’m going to be right,” Schneider added, drawing a laugh. “So then it’s going to be a good thing you hedged.”

After Lindzen and Schneider spoke during an afternoon session, Tudor’s CEO, Paul Jones II, asked Schneider to come to his suite the next morning to chat about the company’s future. “We had a long conversation on how they should invest,” Schneider recalls. “It was not a matter of when, but how.”

Lindzen left Miami without having done more than engage in cocktail chatter with Jones. He headed back to Newton and readied himself for the next PowerPoint presentation he had to deliver in a darkened room. But he wasn’t bothered by the snub, since he believes he’ll be vindicated eventually.

“My best guess is, 20 years from now it will be accepted that global warming is not an issue, and everybody will claim they knew it all along,” he says, adding that he’s not holding out hope of being recognized for his work by future generations. “Chances are, 20 years from now I’ll be dead,” he jokes, “and someone else will want to take credit.”

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