E2 Round-up: Enviros race to define Brown’s climate-changing win

As we noted last night, Republican Scott Brown’s upset win in the Massachusetts Senate election is a blow to Democratic plans to pass legislation that caps greenhouse gas emissions.

The question is how big.

Not so big, argues Heather Taylor-Miesle of the Natural Resources Defense Council in the Huffington Post, as environmentalists race to show their agenda hasn’t suffered a mortal wound.

She points to signs such as Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) recent pledge to bring up a climate bill this year and the work of Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) to craft a bipartisan plan.

Taylor-Miesle also writes that she’s “not counting Brown out.”

“Most of Brown's tea party supporters are out-of-staters, eager to push their agenda in whatever campaign they can. But now that the election is over, those folks will return home, and Brown will be left with the people who elected him -- Massachusetts citizens who have said in poll after poll that they want clean energy and climate legislation to pass,” she writes.

Over at the Dallas Morning News, however, Washington reporter Dave Michaels wonders whether climate change legislation is "still a priority for team Obama.”

His piece came before Brown’s win last night, but he notes that White House senior advisor David Axelrod didn’t list climate among the top 2010 priorities in a briefing with reporters Tuesday.

The future of the U.S. coal industry is bound up in whatever climate change decisions lawakers do -- or don't -- make.

But even with national legislation in limbo, a new report by West Virginia environmental consultants predicts continued declines in Central Appalachian coal production and urges states in the region to boost their support for renewable energy development, the Associated Press reports.