WASHINGTON — After giving up on a sweeping climate-change bill last month, Senate leaders pulled the plug Tuesday on a scaled-down energy bill, dooming for the moment any effort to address what had been a major 2008 campaign theme for Democrats.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid blamed the failure on Republicans and vowed to try again in September.
“We tried jujitsu. We tried yoga. We tried everything we can with Republicans to get them to come along with us and be reasonable,” Reid told reporters Tuesday.
But the bill also failed to gain the support of key Democrats from states that depend on offshore drilling, including Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu and Alaska’s Mark Begich. Both said they feared its impact on small producers and wanted a greater state share of federal offshore royalties.
The conflicting interests of various energy regions have from the beginning been the big obstacle to the Democratic effort to piece together a coherent national energy policy on the scale imagined in 2008.
“The resistance is based on short- term political needs here, which are ill-founded. But that’s where we find ourselves,” said Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo.
“At some point, there will be a closing of the door in the sense that the rest of the world is going to be so far ahead of us that we won’t be able to compete at the level we should,” he said.
The scaled-down bill promoted electric cars and the wider use of natural gas to fuel the country’s trucking fleet.
It also lifted the liability cap on damages that oil companies would have to pay after an offshore spill and sought to improve the response to such disasters.
Udall spent the past several weeks fighting to include in the bill a remnant of the more ambitious energy legislation that passed a Senate committee last year — a renewable-energy standard (RES) requiring the country to produce at least 15 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020.
But on that issue as well, regional differences divide Democrats.
Reid left an RES out of the scaled- down bill in part because it is opposed by Southern lawmakers who say their states don’t have the renewable resources to meet the target.
Udall disputed that, pointing to a recent Duke University study that showed Southern states could meet the goal through the use of biomass.
Republicans claim Reid had been unwilling to negotiate on amendments to the Democratic version of the bill or allow a vote on a Republican alternative that appeared to have some Democratic support.
Nor do they expect anything to change much by the fall.
“This bill was never meant to pass. It was designed as a political stunt that would use Republicans as the fall guy,” said Robert Dillon, Republican spokesman for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
“If that was the process now, why would it be any different in September?” Dillon said.
