Global warming: holding Obama's feet to the fire.

• Author: Mark, Jason

FABIENNE ANTOINE CAME ALL the way from Atlanta to Washington, D.C., to hold President Obama to his word.

The twenty-one-year-old political science major at Spelman College says she was psyched when, during his second Inaugural Address, the President made a bold moral claim for taking action to address global warming, telling the nation, "We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations." But she worries that political pressures will temper the President's passion. So she and friends formed a group called Sustainable Spelman and organized some fifty young women to charter a bus and drive nine hours through the night to join the Forward on Climate rally in the capital.

"This rally is to make sure he carries out what he said, that he does what he promised," Antoine, who is also president of Spelman's Young Democrats club, told me. "There needs to be more accountability for what these oil companies are doing, and more policies that support clean energy."

Antoines guarded optimism was the prevailing mood among the estimated 35,000 people who gathered on the National Mall on the Sunday of Presidents Day weekend for what organizers said was the largest U.S. climate demonstration to date. (Similar protests occurred in at least eighteen cities around the country the same day.) Kids in strollers and elderly folks in wheelchairs endured biting, below-freezing winds and a mud-clogged field at the base of the Washington Monument to call on Obama to take strong action to slash U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and put the United States on the path to a renewable energy future.

"There is no Planet B" was among the most popular hand-lettered placards as the crowd marched around the White House, at times erupting in chants of, "Hey, Obama--we don't want no climate drama!" One family marched with an Earth flag stamped with the words "Too Big to Fail" above the planet. "Texas Baptists for Clean Energy," read a banner carried by a group of eight women who had traveled to the demonstration from Nacogdoches.

The Sierra Club, 350.org, and the Hip-Hop Caucus organized the rally to put a face on the two-thirds of Americans who, according to recent polls, say they want government action to address climate change. The purpose was to demonstrate to the President that he has the political backing to challenge the powerful fossil fuel industry.

Environmentalists say that what Obama chooses to...