Two short chapters at the back of Hillary Clinton’s memoir “Hard Choices” provide the most detailed glimpse to date into her thinking on global warming and the U.S. energy boom as the former secretary of State weighs a second run for the White House.

Clinton opens her climate chapter with a well-known tale about when she and President Obama “crashed” a secret meeting of the leaders of China, India, Brazil and South Africa at the 2009 U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. The heads of those countries were discussing blocking a potential agreement on greenhouse gas emissions.

“After exchanging looks of ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking,’” Clinton writes, she and Obama marched off to confront their counterparts and strike a deal.

The resulting compromise was either a step forward or a spectacular failure, depending on whom you ask. Countries agreed to set short-term goals for reducing carbon emissions, but they kicked a comprehensive solution down the road. Given the outcome, some expressed surprise that Clinton would lead with that story, let alone use it as a recurring buddy-cop anecdote in public comments she’s made since the book’s release last month (“Newsweek later described us as ‘a diplomatic version of Starsky and Hutch,’” she writes).

But the episode places Clinton at the forefront of Obama’s climate policy and deflects attention from her reputation for playing it safe at the State Department. In her telling, Clinton made hard choices on the world’s biggest stage and then flew home at once disappointed and more determined than ever. Since then, Clinton has zeroed in on smaller climate change initiatives.

“If you try to hit home runs, you’ll end up popping out more often than not,” she writes. “But if you also go for singles and doubles, even walks, they can add up.”

As part of her “smart power” approach to diplomacy at State – which combined attention to conventional war-and-peace problems with a spotlight on energy, disease and other challenges – she elevated the issue of climate change and turned it into more of a U.S. priority.

To Clinton, who led the department from 2009 to 2013, the move was a pragmatic response to new threats. “Many of the international challenges I dealt with over my four years directly or indirectly sprang from the world’s insatiable hunger for energy,” she writes, among them an oil-driven conflict between Sudan and South Sudan and the ongoing dispute over resources in the South China Sea.

Balancing an expanded climate portfolio with international crises marked a departure from the approach of previous secretaries of State.

While Clinton attended to headline-grabbing wars from Afghanistan to Libya, she quietly instituted an energy diplomacy office at Foggy Bottom. In 2010, she launched a global effort to replace millions of in-home cookstoves in developing countries with cleaner models that produce less air pollution. Two years later, Clinton announced the creation of an international coalition tasked with reducing methane and black carbon emissions.

The cookstoves program, in particular, with its focus on women’s and children’s health issues, was criticized by foreign policy hawks who argued that the female secretary of State’s interest in soft diplomacy undermined America’s power abroad. But Clinton also won the respect of U.S. lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

“These are difficult issues to navigate,” former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told Greenwire. But, he said, “Hillary Clinton does her homework. She was very engaged with our counterparts around the world on these matters.”

In 2011, Salazar – a fellow first-term Obama administration Cabinet member – traveled to Greenland with Clinton to attend a meeting of the Arctic Council. On the flight to Nuuk, the delegation had a “very, very limited conversation” about the Arctic and climate change, according to Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who helped organize the trip.

“We got there, and I have to admit, I was a little bit apprehensive about her background and knowledge,” Murkowski recalled in an interview. “And she impressed me in a way that I could not have imagined. Secretary Clinton was knowledgeable on the issues, and she clearly led the conversation” at the council.

Clinton mentions the visit in passing in her book, along with separate trips she made to Alaska, Canada and Norway, where she says she was able to witness the impacts of climate change firsthand. She expresses concern that the region’s untapped energy resources could lead to a “latter-day gold rush” led by China and Russia (she leaves out the United States, which under Obama approved plans to drill for oil and gas in Alaska).

Seeing melting glaciers in the Arctic made an impression. But her critics seem unconvinced.

Clinton “was certainly interested” in global warming as a senator and secretary of State, said Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who has also traveled with Clinton in the Arctic. “But,” he said in an interview, “I didn’t see her make any significant proposals.”

Actually, Clinton introduced eight environment and energy-related bills during the years she spent in the Senate following her election in 2000. But none of them called for sweeping reform.

By the time the Senate took up cap-and-trade legislation, after the House passed a bill in 2009 that would have set a price and limit on carbon emissions, Clinton had left to join the Obama administration. No longer in Congress, Clinton avoided the messy partisan haggling that ultimately sank the administration’s best chance at enacting a broad climate change law.

And unlike the president, Clinton has emerged largely unscathed from other policy battles, as well.

Keystone XL, fracking

The State Department started its review of the Keystone XL pipeline on her watch, and Clinton waded into the debate in 2010 when she said that the federal government was “inclined” to approve the project.

Her tacit support infuriated environmentalists. But once Obama postponed a final decision on the pipeline until after the 2012 presidential election, he ensured that Clinton would not have to face the political fallout head-on. Clinton has steered clear of controversial environmental issues like KXL since stepping down last year.

When she was asked for her opinion on KXL recently, Clinton told a Canadian newspaper that she couldn’t respond.

In her book, Clinton avoids KXL altogether. Direct references to hydraulic fracturing are omitted, as well.

In her chapter on jobs and energy, Clinton writes that America can become a “clean energy superpower” by instituting policies “that encourage rather than undercut the transition” to renewable sources.

But she also makes an unapologetic case for the domestic oil and gas boom. Fossil fuel production could generate as many as 1.7 million jobs by 2020, Clinton notes. The approach comes with risks.

“There are legitimate climate change concerns about the new extraction practices and their impact on local water, soil and air supplies,” Clinton writes. “So it’s crucial that we put in place smart regulations and enforce them, including not drilling when the risks are too high.”

Few on the left would mistake that for a full-throated call to climate action in 2016.

“The real question is, is she going to be a 21st century presidential candidate or not?” Bill McKibben, one of the country’s leading environmentalists, said in an interview. “Cheerleading for the all-of-the-above energy boom isn’t a particularly good way to do it.”

From a purely political perspective, however, Clinton’s decision might make sense. Courting the Democratic Party base without straying too far from the center has worked before. That it remains so effective says as much about voter attitudes as it does about the Republican presidential field.

The environmental movement and wealthy liberal donors are doing their best to turn climate change into a litmus test for politicians, right up there with questions over health care and the role of the federal government. But polls show that they still have a long way to go. According to a Gallup survey in March, 24 percent of Americans said they worried about climate change a “great deal.”

And climate change ranked second-to-last in that poll on a list of the 15 most pressing problems facing the country. Energy and the environment also finished in the bottom half, behind unemployment, federal spending and terrorist attacks, to name a few.

The green agenda has worked its way into some midterm races this year, especially in energy-producing states like Kentucky and West Virginia, where candidates have sparred over Obama’s “war on coal.” But even there, global warming is still part of a broader debate about federal oversight and economic growth.

‘Dramatic changes’

Attitudes about climate change, like gay marriage, could shift faster than expected. Yet several recent events when this seemed possible – the release of former Vice President Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” say, or Superstorm Sandy – turned out to be false alarms.

Moreover, they’ve prompted Clinton’s likely 2016 GOP opponents to shift even further to the right, changing the way that she would have to campaign.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is the only potential Republican contender with a moderate position on climate change. The rest, from Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, are either indifferent or serious climate skeptics, according to The Washington Post.

Environmentalists view this as an advantage. “We firmly believe that you can’t win in 2016 and be a straight-up denier,” said Heather Taylor-Miesle, who runs the Natural Resource Defense Council Action Fund.

The Republican Party’s standard-bearers have apparently come to the opposite conclusion: A conservative stance on climate change won’t win over undecided Democrats, but it probably won’t alienate enough moderate Republicans and independents to lose the election, either.

Clinton has been around long enough to triangulate accordingly. Before she gave book tours and lived in the White House, before law school and her marriage, Clinton landed a job with the parks department in the Chicago suburb where she grew up. It was her “first paying job, other than babysitting,” Clinton writes near the end of “Hard Choices,” and helped teach her the value of hard work.

More than a half-century later, “climate change, scarce resources, and local pollution will force us to make dramatic changes,” Clinton writes. “If we do it well the changes will create new jobs, new businesses, and a better quality of life.”