Axelrod: Climate change needs GOP

Senior White House adviser David Axelrod isn’t exactly talking up cap-and-trade these days even as President Obama is urging the Senate not to give up on climate legislation.

Axelrod, in a C-SPAN interview that aired Sunday, hardly threw the White House’s weight behind getting cap-and-trade through Congress in 2010 even as he said the U.S. must fight for leadership in "clean energy" industries.

“In terms of, specifically, of that aspect of it, the cap-and-trade aspect of it, there are efforts ongoing in the United States Senate between Republicans and Democrats to come up with an overall energy bill that would help drive this clean energy investment and clean energy economy,” he said.

“If a consensus can be reached, we want to support that, but this is clearly an issue that Republicans and Democrats are going to have to do together. It is not something that one party or the other party can do,” Axelrod added. (His comments come about 22 minutes into the C-SPAN interview found here.)

Axelrod had similar things to say – playing up energy measures, playing down caps on greenhouse gas emissions – in brief comments after Obama’s State of the Union address last month.

His comments come amid questions about whether Senate Democrats will take up legislation that includes both emissions limits and new support for low-carbon energy, or instead break off more popular energy measures while shelving controversial climate language.

Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) are trying to craft a compromise plan that would include emissions limits, larger federal financing for nuclear power, and expanded offshore drilling, among other measures.

Axelrod, in the C-SPAN interview, noted that China and India are pushing hard to snag emerging alternative energy industries. “We have to compete for those jobs in the future and so we can’t just walk off the field when it comes to energy,” he said.