WASHINGTON — By brokering a climate deal in Copenhagen a week ago, President Barack Obama has committed himself to a more daunting task: pushing for comprehensive climate legislation in the Senate next year.
Although many senators, especially key Republicans, have shown little appetite for backing yet another ambitious bill in the aftermath of the polarizing health care debate, it is clear that enacting legislation to cap the U.S. carbon-dioxide output and allow polluters to trade emission permits is essential to delivering on the pledges that Obama made to other world leaders.
In an interview with The Washington Post last week, Obama said, “There is no doubt that energy legislation is going to be tough, but I feel very confident about making an argument to the American people that we should be a leader in clean-energy technology — that that will be one of the key engines that drives economic growth for decades to come.”
White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said the fact that “countries like China and India set carbon-intensity targets for the first time in history” should bolster the administration’s legislative effort.
Since taking office in January, Obama and his deputies have regarded international climate talks as a way to get the sort of commitments from major emerging economies that would allow them to sell a cap-and-trade bill to skeptical lawmakers back home.
As part of last week’s accord, the four biggest greenhouse- gas emitters in the developing world — China, India, Brazil and South Africa — agreed to list voluntary climate targets as part of an international registry and to allow third-party countries to scrutinize whether the four are making the emission cuts they say they are.
“That was the strategy all along,” said Mark Helmke, a senior adviser to Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., whose vote could be critical to passing a climate bill. “In that context, it was a home run.”
Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, the top Republican on the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, called language in the Copenhagen deal allowing for verification of developing countries’ carbon cuts “a very small step forward.”
“We need to find ways to move forward in a bipartisan effort that makes sense for America, regardless of whether the rest of the world follows through or not,” Murkowski said.
In the wake of the health care debate, winning Republican support for such a bill is crucial, even if it might mean adding provisions favored by the nuclear and oil industries, or scaling back the legislation’s scope.
