E2-Wire

The big Senate climate and energy bill hasn’t arrived yet, but the battles over money have already begun.

Over at our Hillicon Valley tech blog, my colleague Kim Hart has a post about Google, the major venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, environmentalists and others urging the White House to make household access to energy use data a top priority. The more consumers and businesses know, the more they'll make changes that reduce power use and greenhouse gas emissions, the companies and groups say in a new letter to the White House.

The very early moves in what will probably become a legal battle over expanded offshore drilling began Friday with the Interior Department’s first formal request for public comments on its new plan to allow increased development in federal waters.

Interior’s Minerals Management Service – the agency that regulates oil-and-gas development in federal waters – published a “notice of intent” to prepare an environmental impact statement (EIS) for its planned 2012-2017 leasing plan.

The administration has broadly proposed expanding oil-and-gas exploration to include the large swaths of the mid-Atlantic and southeastern coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and more Arctic waters off Alaska’s northern coast.

The New York Times surveyed the lay of the land for Senate climate and energy legislation Sunday. White House climate czar Carol Browner says it doesn’t resemble the health care terrain.

The Democrats passed health care with no GOP votes (and in the Senate, before their majority went from 60 to 59 seats with the election of Sen. Scott Brown in Massachusetts).

On climate, Browner sees a chance for several GOP votes beyond Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a co-author of the upcoming Senate bill.

Activists are questioning whether Obama is giving up bargaining chips too early, and risking the support of coastal Democrats.

Gas prices are well off the record highs they reached in the summer of 2008 but Americans apparently haven’t lost any fervor for drilling, according to a new Rasmussen poll.

The firm, which has been described as a conservative leaning polling firm, conducted a national telephone survey that found 72 percent of voters believe offshore drilling should be allowed. That was the highest level of support in the three years Rasmussen has conducted the survey.

The poll was done after the announcement by the Obama administration to open more areas offshore to oil and gas development. According to Rasmussen, most voters wanted the administration to go further. Fifty-nine percent of respondents say offshore drilling should be permitted off the coasts of California and New England, areas still largely shut off to oil development.

President Obama on Friday sought to counter Republican claims that his offshore oil-and-gas drilling plan is too limited – attacks he predicted will intensify when gasoline prices begin their annual summer climb.

“The notion that we could drill our way out of the problem – you’ll start hearing about this because you know what happens during the summer, as soon as gas prices start going up, every summer it is the same thing,” Obama said. “Politicians start standing up and [saying] we are going to do something about it. And these days some of my colleagues on the Republican side, what they will say is, you have got to drill even more.”

“Just remember the statistics when you start hearing this: we account for two percent of the world’s oil reserves, but we use 20 percent of the world’s oil . . . We can’t drill our way out of the problem,” Obama added.

House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.) is not pleased with EPA’s decision Thursday to toughen water quality requirements for proposed mountaintop coal mining projects in West Virginia and other Appalachian states.

"While EPA's effort to more clearly articulate the criteria it wants to impose on proposed coal mining operations in Appalachia is appreciated, I continue to have a fundamental concern with the agency treating coal mining in this region differently than any other industrial activity in the United States," Rahall said in a prepared statement, according to the West Virginia State Journal.

"The Clean Water Act should be applied evenly and equally throughout the country, as has been done so in the past. EPA is departing from that practice and I strongly disagree with it creating a separate set of standards and criteria for Appalachian coal mining," he added.

A big wind energy conference in Texas next month will feature a speech by former President George W. Bush, who didn’t always see eye-to-eye with renewable energy advocates while in office.

From the American Wind Energy Association announcement earlier this week that Bush will address their WINDPOWER 2010 conference in Dallas:

The former president will talk about his experience as Texas's governor, and as President, in advancing the wind energy agenda. (Texas is the number one wind state in the United States and, though most people don't realize it, it was President Bush who first raised the prospect of getting 20% of U.S. electricity from wind.)

There’s plenty of coverage of EPA’s decision Thursday to toughen water quality rules for Appalachian coal mining operations, which Jim blogged about here.

The Wall Street Journal calls the action a “significant step in the EPA's push under the Obama administration to limit the practice of mountaintop coal mining and its environmental effects.”

Environmentalists are thrilled with the plan, while the industry said it will cost jobs.