June 25, 2013 9:57AM # Obama Tackles Global Warming — On His Own Authority By [Roger Pilon](https://www.cato.org/people/roger-pilon) --- SHARE In [a speech today at Georgetown University](http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/climate-change-energy-plan-barack-obama-93311.html?hp=t3_3), President Obama will lay out his sweeping plan to address what he believes is our “moral obligation” to address climate change – apparently oblivious to [serious studies](https://www.cato.org/pubs/Global-Climate-Change-Impacts.pdf) questioning the extent and cause of the problem, to the futility of our acting alone as China, India, and others do nothing, and to the far-reaching economic effects his plan will have on an economy already struggling with regulatory overkill. And he plans to do all of this not with the concurrence of Congress but in the face of congressional opposition. He will act unilaterally, by executive order. Yet he has that power, thanks to constitutionally dubious congressional delegations and court decisions stretching back over many years. See [here](https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/articles/climatecoup_chapt1_pilon.pdf) for a detailed discussion of how the president came to have such awesome power. ##### Related Tags [Energy and Environment](https://www.cato.org/research/energy-environment), [Government and Politics](https://www.cato.org/government-politics), [Constitutional Law](https://www.cato.org/constitutional-law), [Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies](https://www.cato.org/robert-levy-center-constitutional-studies) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).