The Obama administration gave environmentalists little to cheer about last week, but the game is hardly over.

When it comes to climate change, Obama’s rhetoric has been striking and unequivocal (for example here), but with congressional deadlock, his ability to enact climate legislation has been … well, nonexistent. He has been able to make some progress without legislation — the new fuel economy standards [pdf], for example — but with only three years left in his administration his climate legacy is very much in question.

I suspect many in the environmental community, myself included, were looking for some statement from President Obama in last week’s State of the Union address that would lay out an aggressive agenda of new