White House climate discussion yields pledge to keep talking

President Obama met for over an hour with 14 senators and several cabinet officials late Tuesday afternoon to discuss climate and energy legislation.

The bipartisan White House meeting didn’t produce any breakthroughs, but it wasn’t designed to be legislative horse-trading session anyway.

A White House aide said Obama “expressed his strong support for a bipartisan effort to establish clean energy incentives that will create jobs and reduce our dependence on foreign oil.”

“The senators shared the common goal of moving America towards energy independence and creating clean energy jobs that can’t be exported, and they agreed to continue the dialogue about a path forward for comprehensive energy legislation,” the aide said.

The meeting included Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who are trying to cobble together a compromise plan.

Senators called the meeting constructive. “There is a lot more agreement than anybody thought. When he [Obama] convenes us there are serious discussions, and that’s good news,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) told The Hill after the meeting.

Brown said the meeting didn’t get into specifics about the nascent Kerry-Graham-Lieberman plan, which will depart from the sweeping economy-wide cap-and-trade plan the House approved last year.

“There really wasn’t that kind of detail,” Brown said.

Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), who also attended, said President Obama reaffirmed his support for final congressional action this year.

A big climate and energy bill faces major Senate hurdles amid competing priorities, and resistance among many Republicans and some centrist Democrats to mandatory emissions curbs.

“We had a good discussion about what’s possible and how to proceed. I don’t think there was total consensus on all of that, but I think everybody was speaking in a very constructive way,” Bingaman said.

Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman are mulling an approach that would create a cap-and-trade system for power plants, while limits on other types of industrial facilities would be delayed for several years. Emissions from motor fuels would be addressed outside the cap-and-trade system through some kind of fee or tax.

Lieberman cautioned Tuesday that their plan remains under development. He said the trio hopes to float draft legislation before the spring recess, which begins in slightly over two weeks.

The three senators met earlier in the day Tuesday with officials from a wide array of trade associations, including the American Petroleum Institute, Edison Electric Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and several others.

And, from the White House, here’s the whole list of participants from the meeting with senators that Obama convened:

Secretary of Energy Steven Chu
Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar
Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack
EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson
Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change Carol Browner
Assistant to the President for Economic Policy and NEC Directory Larry Summers
Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M)
Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.)
Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio)
Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.)
Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine)
Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)
Senator Judd Gregg (R-N.H.)
Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.)
Senator George LeMieux (R-Fla.)
Senator Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.)
Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.)
Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska)
Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.)
Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.)