A Climate and Energy Stalemate

On the day he clinched the Democratic nomination for president in 2008, Barack Obama declared that future generations would look back and say, “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” He made addressing climate change, domestically and as part of a concerted international effort, a central tenet of his campaign platform and a top priority of his first year in office.

Then the president backed off, hamstrung by an economic crisis and implacable opposition from Republicans, who were cheered on and financed by their ideological allies and fossil fuel companies. International talks organized by the United Nations made scant progress, not least because the United States was unwilling to accept a binding accord unless it required comparable emissions cuts by all countries regardless of their stage of economic development.

As Mr. Obama seeks re-election, a warming climate and its related challenges — more frequent droughts and wildfires, rising seas and more violent storms — are near the bottom of the national agenda. The Republicans, some of whom as recently as four years ago shared Democrats’ concern about a warming climate and advocated a market-based approach known as cap and trade to reduce climate-altering emissions, are nearly unanimous in questioning whether global warming even exists. Democrats, burned by the Senate’s rejection of legislation addressing climate change and wary of any policy that could be portrayed as raising energy costs, have fallen silent on the topic.

The public is divided, with fervent minorities at either end of the debate and a broad crowd in the middle that believes that human activity is altering the climate but remains conflicted over what government, corporations and individuals should do about it. Attuned to the public’s ambivalence, both political parties and their presidential candidates are playing down the climate issue. Instead, what passes for an energy debate in the United States is rivalry over which party is more devoted to extracting oil and gas from the ground and the seabed.

Over the new few months, we hope to jump-start a discussion about energy and climate policy in the United States. We’ll have experts weigh in and welcome readers’ opinions on broad questions that may be neglected on the campaign trail.

Is climate change a real and present danger? Why does the United States lag behind many other industrialized nations in addressing it? Do Americans need to reduce their energy consumption? Should there be limits to where and when and how they drill for oil, frack for gas and mine coal? How far should regulators go in trying to reduce air pollution and emissions of greenhouse gases? Should the federal government subsidize alternative sources of energy like the sun, wind and biofuels?

In campaigns past, those complex issues have been reduced to slogans like “Drill, baby, drill” or simplistic calls to eliminate the Energy Department or the Environmental Protection Agency. With your help, we’ll try to dig a little deeper.