Zack Colman reports for The Hill:

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) on Thursday outlined a slate of climate change actions that President Obama could execute with his own authority.

The lawmakers conveyed a bleak outlook for climate legislation this Congress, noting considerable Republican opposition in the House. But they said Obama’s climate comments during his Monday inaugural address raised the prospects for administrative action to address the issue. …

Whitehouse, Waxman and Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) laid out a menu of options for executive action on climate change in a Thursday letter to Obama [pdf]. Among them were moves federal agencies could take to curb greenhouse gas emissions and enlisting national laboratories to pump out clean-energy technology. …

Whitehouse also suggested the federal government could use its procurement powers to strike deals with cleaner, sustainable contractors.

Whitehouse has made clear in the weeks since he won re-election last fall that one of his core priorities during his second term will be pushing Washington for action on climate change, as well as new efforts to protect the health of the sea through his bipartisan Senate Oceans Caucus.

“I think it’s going to take some hammering to open the window [of what's possible] up a bit, but the public is now so clearly behind doing something about climate change that it puts the Republican opposition in a very different – and I think, before long, untenable – position,” Whitehouse told me during an interview in his Capitol Hill office earlier this month.

With that in mind, on Thursday Whitehouse also restarted the series of weekly floor speeches about climate change he’s been giving for the past year. The video of yesterday’s edition is here.

​(photo: Whitehouse’s office)