Obama prepares for new push on climate change President Barack Obama is preparing to take a new swing at climate change, with his administration ready to impose new rules on coal-fired power plants, promote energy efficiency standards and expand renewable energy production on public lands. With his top legislative priority - comprehensive immigration reform - making steady progress in the Senate, Mr Obama appears to be looking for other ways to ensure a lasting legacy from his second term. "The effort to slow climate change requires bold action," the president said during an address in Berlin on Wednesday, warning that "the grim alternative" was "more severe storms, more famine and floods, new waves of refugees, coastlines that vanish, oceans that rise." Mr Obama has repeatedly exhorted the need to act to curb global warming but has done little to act on his words. Climate change legislation has no chance of passing in Congress, and regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency has stalled as it awaits a new administrator. The full Senate has yet to confirm Mr Obama's nominee to head the agency, Gina McCarthy, although a vote could take place this month. But environmentalists, who were optimistic after Mr Obama's previous mentions of action on climate change, say this time is for real. "The president has raised expectations and he knows that," said Dan Lashof, director of National Resources Defense Council's climate and clean air programme. I don't think we would be hearing this drumbeat of hints if the administration hadn't made the decision to really move forward. Overcoming the obstacles - including from Republicans critical of "job killing" regulations and from the oil industry - will require "presidential leadership," Mr Lashof says. Heather Zichal, Mr Obama's top energy and environment adviser, this week said that the president would soon outline "common sense" steps to tackle climate change. "He is serious about making it a second-term priority," she told a forum this week. The president, she said, would champion initiatives that would not require Congressional approval or financing. She suggested that among the first would be an effort to target emissions from coal-fired power plants. The EPA has already presented a proposal under the Clean Air Act to limit carbon emissions from new coal-fired plants. But the agency missed its own April deadline to finalise the regulations. People close to the EPA say that it is concerned the proposal is not sufficiently robust to withstand the certain legal challenges, and that the agency will add additional information to the rule. The EPA is also expected to propose standards for existing coal-fired power plants, which generate about 42 per cent of the US's electricity. The NRDC has said that limiting emissions from these plants, the US's single largest emitter, could cut the pollutants they produce by a quarter. This would go a long way to achieving Mr Obama's goal of reducing the US's carbon emissions by 17 per cent from 2005 levels by 2020. Frank O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, said that the issue of coal-fired power plants needed to be tackled, and tackled the right way. "Everyone knows that this is the giant environmental elephant in the room," he said. During Mr Obama's tenure, the EPA has already introduced standards to double the fuel efficiency of cars, but environmentalists say it needs to finalise a rule to make petrol cleaner. Reducing the sulphur in petrol from 30 to 10 parts per million, as the EPA proposed in March, would be equivalent to taking 33m cars off the road. Environmentalists also want the administration to update its clean air standards on smog. The administration notoriously took the issue off the table in 2011 but had signalled it would revisit the issue this year. Some environmental groups are talking about filing law suits against the administration to force it to act on its legal requirement to review the rules every five years. Mr Obama's environmental reputation is on the line, said Mr O'Donnell, especially as it is widely considered inevitable that the president will approve the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline linking Canada's tar sands to the American refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. "When Obama took office, there were claims he was going to be our greenest president," he said. Now people are saying that he's among the three most environmental [US] presidents of the 21st century!!