Obama to senators: Include carbon limits in energy package

Leading Senate advocates of climate change legislation emerged from a White House meeting proclaiming President Barack Obama offered firm support for including greenhouse gas curbs in the broad energy package slated for Senate debate this summer.

“The president was very clear about putting a price on carbon and limiting greenhouse gas emissions,”  Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) said outside the White House after the 90-minute meeting between Obama and a bipartisan group of about 20 senators.

Carbon pricing is shorthand for cap-and-trade or other methods for creating a cost for emitting greenhouse gases.

“[Obama] was very strong about the need to put a price on carbon and make polluters pay,” said Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who authored a sweeping climate and energy bill with Kerry.

But the White House, in a statement after the meeting, offered a more cautious take on the president’s push for carbon provisions, noting he is open to other approaches that do not price carbon.

Obama told the senators that “he still believes the best way for us to transition to a clean energy economy is with a bill that makes clean energy the profitable kind of energy for America’s businesses by putting a price on pollution.”

But the White House statement then adds: “Not all of the Senators agreed with this approach, and the President welcomed other approaches and ideas that would take real steps to reduce our dependence on oil, create jobs, strengthen our national security and reduce the pollution in our atmosphere.”

“The President said that there was a strong foundation and consensus on some key policies and the President urged the Senators to come together based on that foundation. There was agreement on the sense of urgency required to move forward with legislation and the President is confident that we will be able to get something done this year,” the White House said.

The strength of the White House push for climate provisions will help determine whether such provisions — which face widespread GOP resistance and skepticism from several Democrats — will be in the mix in the energy package. Kerry and Lieberman also said they are offering to compromise and scale back the reach of their bill.

Senior Republicans who took part in the meeting continued to attack climate provisions they have dubbed a “national energy tax.”

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), the chairman of the Senate GOP conference, said Republicans would work with the White House on legislation to boost electric vehicles, nuclear power, and energy research and development.

“If we want a clean energy bill, take a national energy tax off the table,” Alexander said after the meeting. “As long as we take a national energy tax off the table, there’s no reason we can’t have clean energy legislation.”

He also said that “priority one, two and three for any meeting on energy is to make sure we give the President whatever he needs to clean up the oil spill and to help people who are hurt and to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Kerry and Lieberman said they are willing to scale back the scope of their climate plan, which as written would impose limits on electric power plants, manufacturers, transportation fuels and other sources.

“We are prepared to scale back the reach of our legislation in order to try and find that place of compromise because we believe and I think the president believes very strongly that what is important is for America to get started,” Kerry said.

Lieberman said that some lawmakers – whom he did not name – indicated a new willingness at the meeting to consider carbon emissions provisions.

“Some of our colleagues who up until this time have been at least publicly reluctant about . . . putting a price on carbon pollution said they would be willing to discuss limited forms of doing that in this bill,” he said. “To me that is a breakthrough that Senator Kerry and I want to take advantage of by sitting and talking with those colleagues across party lines as quickly as we can.”

Some lawmakers have suggested limiting a climate bill to only electric power plants.

“There are any number of variations on how we could do that. That would certainly be one of them,” Kerry said of a utility-focused plan.

Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) said after the meeting there is a growing willingness among senators to focus just on electric utilities in a carbon pricing plan.

According to Carper, Obama said “he thinks it’s important to send a price signal on carbon,” but he also encouraged the senators to “aim high but at the end of the day hit something, and to hit a sweet spot.”

“Not every Republican’s interested in doing that, I think several are,” Carper said of a plan focused on utilities.

Centrist Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and Olympia Snowe (Maine) have voiced support for that scaled-back pricing strategy. Snowe attended the White House meeting; Graham did not.

“The question is, do we get started or do we wait until next year to do something?” Carper said. “There’s a real eagerness to get started.”

Carper described one potential way to reach the legislative “sweet spot”: Take the broad energy bill passed last year by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee “with some tweaks,” and offer a series of amendments.

Those amendments could include a utility-only carbon plan, fuel efficiency increases from Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), a bipartisan plan to increase the production of plug-in electric vehicles, and tax provisions to incentivize green energy manufacturing, he said.

This post was last updated at 2:30 p.m.