White House climate adviser Carol Browner said Tuesday that legislation to block EPA regulation of greenhouse gas emissions is unlikely to pass.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) has 40 co-sponsors – including three centrist Democrats – for her plan to overturn EPA’s “endangerment finding” that greenhouse gases threaten humans. The finding is the legal underpinning for regulating emissions.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) has floated a less sweeping plan that would block planned regulation of emissions from industrial plants for two years.

White House climate adviser Carol Browner said Tuesday that the administration backs protecting energy-intensive manufacturing sectors in climate legislation.

Browner notably declined to repeat President Barack Obama’s criticism last year of applying so-called carbon tariffs to goods from countries that do not impose greenhouse gas emissions controls.

She was asked specifically about carbon tariffs at an energy forum in Washington, DC hosted by the National Journal Group. But Browner answered only in broad strokes.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said Tuesday that Republicans will be more likely to support capping greenhouse gas emissions if the majority of the money raised under a climate law is steered to consumers.

"If it is going to produce, over the next 10 years, trillions of dollars of revenue that go to Washington, there is not a lot of [GOP] interest in doing that," Collins said.

"If, on the other hand, the majority of the money is going to be rebated to consumers, I think there would be more openness to that," she added.

* Major economies grappled with climate financing at a Washington, D.C. summit.

The two-day meeting of the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate addressed short-term financing to help developing nations adapt to climate change, State Department climate envoy Todd Stern said in this Reuters account.

The event, which ended Monday, featured presentations on how to make good on financing plans laid out in the limited “Copenhagen Accord” reached at last year’s big U.N. climate summit, Reuters reports.

Senate Democrats are divided over whether to vote on an energy reform bill if it doesn't address global warming. 

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) on Monday returned political fire at a trio of senior Democrats who don’t want coastal states to receive a guaranteed share of the revenues from oil-and-gas production in federal waters off their shores.

Opponents of linking expanded offshore drilling to state revenue sharing fear depriving federal coffers of billions of dollars in lease bids and royalties.

But Landrieu said that unless coastal states can share the money from expanded development to address the impacts, drilling in new areas won’t happen anyway. “If there’s no drilling, the interior states get no money,” she told reporters in the Capitol. “And there is not going to be any drilling unless there is revenue sharing.”

“They [interior states] can have 100 percent of zero, or they can have 65 to 75 percent of something huge. Now let them go figure it out,” she added.

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden will travel to West Virginia this weekend for a memorial service for miners killed in an explosion this month.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Obama and Biden would go Sunday to Beckley, W.Va. on Sunday to attend services for the 29 miners killed in an April 5th explosion in the state's Upper Big Branch mine.

"President Obama will deliver a eulogy honoring the lives of those who perished and offering his deepest condolences to the loved ones they left behind," Gibbs said.

Cross-posted from the Briefing Room.

The simmering battle over offshore oil-and-gas revenue sharing that we wrote about earlier on Monday is a big deal to a key subset of lawmakers: Swing votes on a climate change and energy bill.

(To recap, there’s a fight underway between several inland and coastal senators, who are at odds over whether the upcoming Senate climate and energy bill should provide states with drilling in federal waters off their shores a big share of the revenue.)

Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) – who is a fence-sitter on climate legislation – supports drilling off Virginia’s coast, but along with colleague Mark Warner (D-Va.) has repeatedly called for revenue sharing akin to what’s already provided for several Gulf of Mexico states.

The Treasury Department is marking Earth Day by announcing plans to reduce paper use by millions of pounds.