American officials are saying they need time to gauge the public’s appetite for an ambitious carbon reduction scheme. Steam and other emissions near Melbourne.

By JOHN M. BRODER


WASHINGTON - President Obama came to office promising swift and comprehensive action to combat global climate change, and the topic remains a surefire applause line in his speeches in America and abroad.

Yet the administration has taken a cautious and rather passive role on the issue, proclaiming broad goals while remaining aloof from details of climate legislation now in the United States Congress.

The president’s budget initially included roughly $650 billion in revenue over 10 years from a cap-and-trade emissions plan that he wants adopted. But the administration, while insisting that its health care initiative be protected, did not fight to keep cap-and-trade in the budget resolutions that Congress passed in early April, and it wound up in neither the House’s version nor the Senate’s.

Overseas, American officials are telling their counterparts that they need time to gauge the American public’s appetite for an ambitious carbon reduction scheme before leading any international effort.

At an international climate conference in Germany that ended April 8, some delegates said they were disappointed in the Obama administration’s lack of robust leadership. The explanation offered by Jonathan Pershing, a leader of the American delegation, was that the administration was waiting to measure the American technological and political capacity to address climate change and was looking to Congress to set specific targets for reducing carbon pollution.

Has the administration scaled back its global-warming goals, at least for this year, or is it engaged in sophisticated misdirection?

Maybe some of both. While addressing climate change appears to be slipping down the president’s list of priorities for the year, he is holding in reserve a powerful weapon to regulate carbon dioxide emissions through executive authority.

That weapon takes the form of Environmental Protection Agency regulation of the gases blamed for the warming of the planet, an authority granted the agency by the Supreme Court’s reading of the Clean Air Act. Administration officials consistently say they would much prefer that Congress write new legislation to pre-empt the E.P.A. regulatory power, but they are clearly holding it in reserve as a prod to reluctant lawmakers .

Industry lobbyists and members of Congress who are engaged in writing energy and global warming bills say they are well aware of the E.P.A. process bearing down on them.

“Once the Supreme Court declared carbon dioxide to be a pollutant under the Clean Air Act, E.P.A. had no choice but to act,”said Representative Rick Boucher, a moderate Democrat from a coal-producing region of Virginia.“Most people would rather have Congress act. We can be more balanced; we can take into account the effects on the economy. But if we don’t undertake this, E.P.A. certainly will.”

Still, the agency’s regulations would take months to write and years to become fully effective. Meanwhile, Congress is already starting work on energy and climate legislation, though without significant guidance from the White House, at least in public.

Business lobbyists welcome the White House’s go-slow approach, saying the issue is too complicated and too costly to be rushed, especially in a recession.

Keith McCoy, vice president for energy and resources policy at the National Association of Manufacturers, said his organization was“strongly opposed to an E.P.A. regulatory process for greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act.”

Mr. McCoy said his members would prefer a binding international treaty that would cover all nations, particularly those whose industries compete with energy-intensive American manufacturers.

“Absent that,”he said,“we would prefer a robust and transparent debate within Congress.”

The administration’s caution leaves many environmental advocates frustrated, although most are reluctant to speak on the record for fear of alienating their allies inside government.

One environmental and energy lobbyist with close ties to the White House said the administration had been inhibited by a number of factors, including vacancies in many top policy jobs, an intense early focus on the financial and economic crises, and an unwillingness to alienate business and Congressional leaders with a heavy-handed approach.

“With those realities,”this lobbyist said,“coupled with the fact that the president himself realizes this is harder to do in the midst of recession, they are basically content to see what Congress will do.”