Obama publicly acknowledges that Senate may pass energy bill without cap-and-trade system

Last week we reported rumors of the growing chance of Congress moving ahead with a climate bill without a system for capping and trading greenhouse-gas emissions. Yesterday President Obama publicly voiced that possibility for the first time. "We may be able to separate these things out," Obama said at town-hall meeting in Nashua, N.H. "And it's conceivable that that's where the Senate ends up. But the concept of incentivizing clean energy so that it's the cheaper, more effective kind of energy is one that is proven to work, and is actually a market-based approach."

"I think cap and trade has a long road here obviously," New Hampshire Republican Sen. Judd Gregg told Darren Samuelsohn of ClimateWire and The New York Times. "There's a lot of good initiatives on energy policy that are on a shorter track and will hopefully be pursued aggressively." North Dakota Democratic Sen. Byron Dorgan told Samuelsohn he wants the Senate to pass the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee bill, which would establish a nationwide renewable electricity standard along with a host of other energy incentives.

Obama told the crowd his energy agenda is centered on promoting energy efficiency and clean technologies, including renewables, nuclear power and carbon capture and storage at coal-fired power plants. He said going for an energy bill alone is like saying, "let's do the fun stuff before we do the hard stuff." A White House spokesman told Samuelsohn Obama's comments were simply observationsabout the Senate debate, and his views about comprehensive energy and climate-change legislation were made clear in last week's State of the Union address. Advocates of a broad Senate climate bill "were quick to downplay the president's remarks," Samuelsohn reports. (Read more)