The top lobbyist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said Wednesday that the broad climate change and energy bill under construction in the Senate is moving in a direction that’s “largely in sync” with industry goals.

Bruce Josten, the chamber’s top lobbyist, spoke to reporters Wednesday after a host of industry trade group officials met in the Capitol with Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) about the bill the senators are crafting.

Josten’s comments were hedged and careful, but they were far removed from the Chamber’s strong criticism of the climate bill the House approved last year.

The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers is officially opposed to Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-Alaska) effort to block EPA from regulating greenhouse gases through a congressional resolution of disapproval.

The Alliance, which includes 11 major carmakers, worries the resolution to overturn EPA’s finding that greenhouse gases endanger human health and welfare would derail an agreement reached with the Obama administration on higher fuel efficiency standards. The so-called endangerment finding is the legal underpinning of EPA's efforts to regulate carbon emissions.

Automakers like the agreement they reached with the administration because it allows them to operate under one federal standard and not the “patchwork quilt” of state fuel efficiency regulations they feared.

“At this time last year, the auto industry faced the alarming possibility of having to comply with multiple sets of inconsistent fuel economy standards,”  Alliance President and CEO Dave McCurdy wrote Murkowski in a letter sent today. 

A number of groups are asking EPA for the chance to challenge any new information the agency weighs as it decides whether to raise ethanol blend limits to 15 percent.

It’s a diverse bunch. Forty-one associations  -- from the American Petroleum Institute to the less well known Association for Dressings and Sauces --  “respectfully but strongly” urged EPA to give them additional time to comment any new “data, tests, or studies” that EPA may consider in its rulemaking.

In a separate letter, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers also asked for more time to comment. Alliance spokesman Charles Territo said the concern was that they public record would not include reaction to recent tests designed to measure the effect of higher ethanol blends on engines.

The American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s biggest trade group, said strong industry bidding in Wednesday’s latest Gulf of Mexico lease sale shows that the Obama administration should make more areas available for offshore oil-and-gas drilling.

The Interior Department attracted over $949 million in high bids in the sale, which covered tracts in a 2.4 million acre region of federal waters off the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

“The U.S. government could replicate this success by providing leasing opportunities in unexplored areas of the Outer Continental Shelf – like offshore Virginia, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas off Alaska,” said API President Jack Gerard in a statement Wednesday, calling it a way to bring in new revenues and create jobs.

The industry’s quick effort to call the sale evidence that more areas should be opened up underscores its ongoing lobbying push for more access. The Interior Department is expected to announce long-awaited plans on offshore access as soon as this month.

Also, the Obama administration has signaled that it is open to wider drilling as part of a broad climate change and energy bill.

EPA initiatives launched in the mid-1990s to make children’s health protection a cross-cutting agency focus have suffered from “diminished leadership” over the last decade, according to a Government Accountability Office report released Wednesday.

A 1997 White House executive order mandated new federal efforts to address children’s health, and EPA created an Office of Children’s Health Protection the same year.

“However, the momentum seen in the goals, strategies, and accomplishments for children’s health that resulted from that initiative more than a decade ago has not been sustained through succeeding EPA administrators. Instead, we have seen diminished leadership, planning, and coordination at EPA and across the federal government with regard to children’s environmental health,” the report concludes.

Dozens of military veterans and an environmental group that explores the national security dimensions of global warming are running an ad in several South Carolina newspapers that defends Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-S.C.) work on climate change.

Graham has come under fire from conservatives at home for working on a climate and energy bill that would impose limits on greenhouse gas emissions – it is among the reasons that two county Republican parties have censured him in recent months.

But the plan also aims to boost production of various domestic energy sources, and that’s the main focus of ads slated to run Thursday in four newspapers – the Charleston Post and Courier, The State, The Greenville News and Spartanburg Herald-Journal.

President Obama’s job performance on energy and the environment is falling short of the public’s high expectations when he took office, a new poll finds.

The Gallup poll released Wednesday finds that 52 percent of Americans polled in early March believe Obama is doing a “good job” protecting the environment, while 79 percent expected Obama to do a good job in a poll taken shortly after he took office.

The new poll finds that 43 percent believe Obama is doing a good job improving the nation’s energy policy, compared to 72 percent who expected Obama to do a good job in the earlier survey.

The alternative climate change plan emerging in the Senate will create new barriers to passage even as it knocks down others, reports CNNmoney.com.

Steve Hargreaves, in a broad overview piece, notes the perils of using a tax or fee to address greenhouse gas emissions from motor fuels, rather than putting them under a cap-and-trade system.

Oil companies had bitterly opposed a House-approved cap-and-trade plan that required refiners to secure emissions allowances for their fuels’ use in transportation.

Twenty-one House Republicans led by Rep. Bill Posey (Fla.) are alleging that a Securities and Exchange Commission initiative that presses companies to disclose information about climate risks will hurt corporations and investors alike.

In a letter to the SEC Monday, the lawmakers criticize the SEC’s recent “guidance” to public companies -- they call it an “onerous new mandate” and note that it wasn’t steered through Congress or a formal rule-making process.

The lawmakers allege the initiative will create confusion and uncertainty for companies.