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.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Tuesday that he wants to move forward on energy and climate legislation but that the procedural pathway for the measure is uncertain.

Reid spoke to reporters after former President Bill Clinton used an appearance at the Senate Democrats’ weekly caucus lunch to argue that such a measure is key to the U.S. economy.

“We know we have to do something with energy. The issue before us is how do we do it,” Reid said in the Capitol.

Former President Bill Clinton urged Senate Democrats to pass energy and climate change legislation that he said would provide an economic spark.

Congress should pass a renewable electricity mandate and other incentives to encourage renewable power sources separately from climate change legislation, Iowa Gov. Chet Culver, a Democrat, said Tuesday. Culver is the chairman of the Governors’ Wind Energy Coalition, which includes the governors of 29 states.

“We don’t want these things to get caught up in the broader debate and discussion that will only slow us down,” Culver said. 

The coalition released a report on Tuesday that made several recommendations to Congress to develop the wind energy sector. The list includes a renewable electricity standard that requires 10 percent of power to come from renewable sources like wind, solar, and biomass by 2012 and tax breaks targeted at clean energy projects. 

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