White House seeks to thread the needle on energy with Tuesday meeting

President Barack Obama will have his hands full when he sits down at the White House on Tuesday with a bipartisan group of senators to talk energy and climate legislation: Not only will he be trying to corral a particularly partisan Senate, he’ll also have to unite a divided Democratic caucus on how best to move a bill this election year.

The conversation may be pivotal in shaping the strategy Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) follows to get a climate bill to the floor in July.
 
"When we get back from that meeting I also think we'll have some sense ... of what might be achievable and then we'll move from there," Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) said.

Senate Democrats discussed the same issue at a policy lunch on Thursday, but there was no agreement on policy and some critical members of the caucus — including ones with dissenting voices — were absent. 



Democrats such as Jay Rockefeller (W.Va.), Blanche Lincoln (Ark.), Jim Webb (Va.) and Ben Nelson (Neb.) did not attend. Nelson, for one, admitted he was not a key committee player in the debate and that his staunch opposition to a market-based carbon control policy was widely noted.
 
But Reid and Senate Democrats pushing alternative proposals to price carbon emissions said the meeting showed that the majority of the caucus is on board with at least the concept of holding polluters accountable.

"It says that the majority of the Senate Democratic caucus wants to enact strong comprehensive energy independence legislation that's based on a 'polluter pays' limit on pollution," Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said. "But it's clearly not unanimous."
 
Lieberman — who is pushing a three-sector carbon pricing and energy production plan with Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) — and others backing the plan say that the term “polluter pays” doesn’t necessarily apply to their concept of pricing carbon emissions.

Democrats have acknowledged their effort to pass a broad energy and climate plan this year is dead without help from the other party.
 
Centrist Republicans have rallied behind a bill from Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) that avoids pricing carbon in lieu of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and foreign oil dependency through other means, like fuel efficiency and renewable fuels production.

"I think there's a lot of support for the Lugar bill," Sen. George LeMieux (R-Fla.) said. "I'm looking at it very carefully." LeMieux — who will attend Tuesday’s meeting with Obama — also noted a bill from Dorgan, Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) promoting development of plug-in electric vehicles.
 
Dorgan has been pushing Reid to bring up an energy bill passed last year by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee instead of the larger Kerry-Lieberman plan.
 
"It would be a failure if we end this session of Congress not having taken up or addressed the issues that we spent 10 or 12 weeks marking up in the energy committee with bipartisan consensus," Dorgan said.
 
"Building on something along the lines of what came out of the energy committee is probably more doable at this date on the calendar with all the other controversial issues left to be dealt with," Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) added. "There was a strategic decision made early on to go with health care before climate and energy. And ... whichever issue went second was going to have a difficult time being addressed in a comprehensive way."
 
But liberal Democrats are threatening to revolt if Reid brings up just an energy plan.

"I think a lot of us aren't going to settle for an energy-only bill," Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) said.

Another option is to limit a carbon-pricing plan only to electric utilities. But there has been some bipartisan concern raised about that idea as well.
 
"How do you define utility-only, how do you deal with the revenues, how do you deal with the sector impacts?" Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) said. "There's a lot of questions that are raised with that."
 
He said an alternative carbon-pricing plan from Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) that avoids setting up a massive new carbon market could be something to build upon.
 
"You're better off having a comprehensive bill that takes a pretty simplistic approach," Cardin said. Cantwell and Collins “take a very straight-forward approach — there's not really specific provisions in her bill and I think that's an advantage, quite frankly."