The President: Thank you, Georgetown!

Everybody, please be seated.

And my first announcement today is that you should all take off

your jackets.

(laughter)

I'm going to do the same.

(applause)

It's not that sexy, now.

(laughter)

It is good to be back on campus,

and it is a great privilege to speak from the steps of this

historic hall that welcomed Presidents going back

to George Washington.

I want to thank your President, President DeGioia,

who's here today.

(applause)

I want to thank him for hosting us.

I want to thank the many members of my Cabinet

and my administration.

I want to thank Leader Pelosi and the members of Congress

who are here.

We are very grateful for their support.

And I want to say thank you to the Hoyas in the house for

having me back.

(applause)

It was important for me to speak directly to your

generation, because the decisions that we make now and

in the years ahead will have a profound impact on the world

that all of you inherit.

On Christmas Eve, 1968, the astronauts of Apollo 8 did a

live broadcast from lunar orbit.

So Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, William Anders -- the first

humans to orbit the moon -- described what they saw,

and they read Scripture from the Book of Genesis to the rest

of us back here.

And later that night, they took a photo that would change

the way we see and think about our world.

It was an image of Earth -- beautiful; breathtaking;

a glowing marble of blue oceans, and green forests,

and brown mountains brushed with white clouds,

rising over the surface of the moon.

And while the sight of our planet from space might seem

routine today, imagine what it looked like to those of us

seeing our home, our planet, for the first time.

Imagine what it looked like to children like me.

Even the astronauts were amazed.

"It makes you realize," Lovell would say,

"just what you have back there on Earth."

And around the same time we began exploring space,

scientists were studying changes taking place

in the Earth's atmosphere.

Now, scientists had known since the 1800s that greenhouse gases

like carbon dioxide trap heat, and that burning fossil fuels

release those gases into the air.

That wasn't news.

But in the late 1950s, the National Weather Service began

measuring the levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere,

with the worry that rising levels might someday disrupt the

fragile balance that makes our planet so hospitable.

And what they've found, year after year,

is that the levels of carbon pollution in our atmosphere have

increased dramatically.

That science, accumulated and reviewed over decades,

tells us that our planet is changing in ways that will have

profound impacts on all of humankind.

The 12 warmest years in recorded history have all come

in the last 15 years.

Last year, temperatures in some areas of the ocean reached

record highs, and ice in the Arctic shrank to its smallest

size on record -- faster than most models had

predicted it would.

These are facts.

Now, we know that no single weather event is caused solely

by climate change.

Droughts and fires and floods, they go back to ancient times.

But we also know that in a world that's warmer than it used to

be, all weather events are affected by a warming planet.

The fact that sea level in New York, in New York Harbor,

are now a foot higher than a century ago -- that didn't cause

Hurricane Sandy, but it certainly contributed to the

destruction that left large parts of our mightiest city

dark and underwater.

The potential impacts go beyond rising sea levels.

Here at home, 2012 was the warmest year in our history.

Midwest farms were parched by the worst drought since the Dust

Bowl, and then drenched by the wettest spring on record.

Western wildfires scorched an area larger than

the state of Maryland.

Just last week, a heat wave in Alaska shot temperatures

into the 90s.

And we know that the costs of these events can be measured in

lost lives and lost livelihoods, lost homes, lost businesses,

hundreds of billions of dollars in emergency services

and disaster relief.

In fact, those who are already feeling the effects of climate

change don't have time to deny it -- they're busy

dealing with it.

Firefighters are braving longer wildfire seasons,

and states and federal governments have to figure out

how to budget for that.

I had to sit on a meeting with the Department of Interior and

Agriculture and some of the rest of my team just to figure out

how we're going to pay for more and more expensive fire seasons.

Farmers see crops wilted one year, washed away the next;

and the higher food prices get passed on to you,

the American consumer.

Mountain communities worry about what smaller snowpacks will mean

for tourism -- and then, families at the bottom of the

mountains wonder what it will mean for their drinking water.

Americans across the country are already paying the price of

inaction in insurance premiums, state and local taxes,

and the costs of rebuilding and disaster relief.

So the question is not whether we need to act.

The overwhelming judgment of science -- of chemistry and

physics and millions of measurements -- has put all

that to rest.

Ninety-seven percent of scientists, including,

by the way, some who originally disputed the data,

have now put that to rest.

They've acknowledged the planet is warming and human activity

is contributing to it.

So the question now is whether we will have the courage to act

before it's too late.

And how we answer will have a profound impact on the world

that we leave behind not just to you,

but to your children and to your grandchildren.

As a President, as a father, and as an American,

I'm here to say we need to act.

(applause)

I refuse to condemn your generation and future

generations to a planet that's beyond fixing.

And that's why, today, I'm announcing a new national

climate action plan, and I'm here to enlist your generation's

help in keeping the United States of America a leader --

a global leader -- in the fight against climate change.

This plan builds on progress that we've already made.

Last year, I took office -- the year that I took office,

my administration pledged to reduce America's greenhouse gas

emissions by about 17 percent from their 2005 levels by the

end of this decade.

And we rolled up our sleeves and we got to work.

We doubled the electricity we generated from wind and the sun.

We doubled the mileage our cars will get on a gallon of gas by

the middle of the next decade.

(applause)

Here at Georgetown, I unveiled my strategy

for a secure energy future.

And thanks to the ingenuity of our businesses,

we're starting to produce much more of our own energy.

We're building the first nuclear power plants in more than three

decades -- in Georgia and South Carolina.

For the first time in 18 years, America is poised to produce

more of our own oil than we buy from other nations.

And today, we produce more natural gas than anybody else.

So we're producing energy.

And these advances have grown our economy,

they've created new jobs, they can't be shipped overseas --

and, by the way, they've also helped drive our carbon

pollution to its lowest levels in nearly 20 years.

Since 2006, no country on Earth has reduced its total carbon

pollution by as much as the United States of America.

(applause)

So it's a good start.

But the reason we're all here in the heat today is because we

know we've got more to do.

In my State of the Union address,

I urged Congress to come up with a bipartisan,

market-based solution to climate change,

like the one that Republican and Democratic senators worked on

together a few years ago.

And I still want to see that happen.

I'm willing to work with anyone to make that happen.

But this is a challenge that does not pause

for partisan gridlock.

It demands our attention now.

And this is my plan to meet it -- a plan to cut carbon

pollution; a plan to protect our country from the impacts of

climate change; and a plan to lead the world in a coordinated

assault on a changing climate.

(applause)

This plan begins with cutting carbon pollution by

changing the way we use energy -- using less dirty energy,

using more clean energy, wasting less energy

throughout our economy.

Forty-three years ago, Congress passed a law called

the Clean Air Act of 1970.

(applause)

It was a good law.

The reasoning behind it was simple: New technology can

protect our health by protecting the air we breathe

from harmful pollution.

And that law passed the Senate unanimously.

Think about that -- it passed the Senate unanimously.

It passed the House of Representatives 375 to 1.

I don't know who the one guy was -- I haven't looked that up.

(laughter)

You can barely get that many votes to name a post

office these days.

(laughter)

It was signed into law by a Republican President.

It was later strengthened by another Republican President.

This used to be a bipartisan issue.

Six years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that greenhouse gases are

pollutants covered by that same Clean Air Act.

And they required the Environmental Protection

Agency, the EPA, to determine whether they're a threat

to our health and welfare.

In 2009, the EPA determined that they are a threat to both our

health and our welfare in many different ways -- from dirtier

air to more common heat waves -- and, therefore,

subject to regulation.

Today, about 40 percent of America's carbon pollution comes

from our power plants.

But here's the thing: Right now, there are no federal limits to

the amount of carbon pollution that those plants can pump

into our air.

None.

Zero.

We limit the amount of toxic chemicals like mercury and

sulfur and arsenic in our air or our water,

but power plants can still dump unlimited amounts of carbon

pollution into the air for free.

That's not right, that's not safe, and it needs to stop.

(applause)

So today, for the sake of our children,

and the health and safety of all Americans,

I'm directing the Environmental Protection Agency to put an end

to the limitless dumping of carbon pollution from our power

plants, and complete new pollution standards for both new

and existing power plants.

(applause)

I'm also directing the EPA to develop these

standards in an open and transparent way,

to provide flexibility to different states with different

needs, and build on the leadership that many states,

and cities, and companies have already shown.

In fact, many power companies have already begun modernizing

their plants, and creating new jobs in the process.

Others have shifted to burning cleaner natural gas instead

of dirtier fuel sources.

Nearly a dozen states have already implemented or are

implementing their own market-based programs

to reduce carbon pollution.

More than 25 have set energy efficiency targets.