Obama's gambit to marry US policies on environment and energy

True, America is still guzzling fossil fuels. But since taking office just over a year ago, President Obama has quietly set the nation's energy policy on a new course.

Even as health care dominated the news, Obama energy czar Carol Browner – working with the departments of Interior, Energy, and Transportation – has established a new, unified energy-and-environment policy. But whether this focus on renewable power and energy security can succeed depends largely on whether Congress approves climate-energy legislation that puts a price on carbon emissions, energy experts say.

He and others tick off the administration's most significant energy-related accomplishments to date:

• Accelerating adoption of renewable energy – wind, solar, and geothermal power and battery-powered vehicles – and high-speed rail via $90 billion in new spending and tax incentives from last year's economic stimulus act.

• Defining greenhouse-gas emissions as a danger to human health and the environment, paving the way for the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate them – or for Congress to control them by placing a price on them.

• Unveiling a new "clean car" standard that, for the first time, regulates greenhouse-gas tailpipe emissions. Meshing that with new fuel-efficiency standards for vehicles will save 1.8 billion barrels of oil and nearly 1 billion tons of emissions.