A White House official said energy would remain a top priority for the administration but would be packaged differently.

“I think you’ll see in the next few weeks the administration say, ‘Okay, you may not necessarily agree with the science on climate change, you may not see tackling greenhouse gases as a real priority, but what we can all agree on is creating jobs and investing in a clean-energy economy that’s going to leave the U.S. more competitive,’ ” said Heather Zichal, deputy assistant to the president for energy and climate-change policy.

Facing dim prospects for passing cap-and-trade legislation in the Senate, Obama is looking at the low-hanging fruit. On the congressional side, that means energy efficiency, electric vehicles, incentives for natural gas and a renewable energy standard. For more on this, see my post on potential areas of legislative compromise between Republicans and Democrats.

But it’s the regulatory side where Obama can have the most impact. The administration is expected in the next several months to pass new greenhouse gas limits on stationary sources as well as new limits on ozone pollution. But there are a number of lawmakers who are trying to keep the administration from exercising its regulatory authority to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who is likely to win her nail-biter of a re-election race, renewed her call to block the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions yesterday. She tried to pass such a resolution in the Senate in June, but the proposal failed in a 53-47 vote. Now, with more Republicans in the Senate, a new proposal to block the EPA could pass.

Boucher may very well be one of the first Democrats to lose a seat, in part, because of his vote for cap-and-trade. Virginia’s 9th district is quite conservative and Boucher’s vote for the bill was an unpopular one.

Senate:

Alaska: Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) is facing off against Republican Joe Miller, a Tea Party favorite, and Democrat Scott McAdams. The Associated Press reports that all the candidates engaged yesterday in a last-minute push to gain votes. Even Bill Clinton got in on the action, doing a robocall for McAdams. This race is hugely important on the energy front because Murkowski is the ranking Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Despite her opposition to recent cap-and-trade proposals, she has worked closely over the years with committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), most notably on their comprehensive energy bill, which received bipartisan support in committee, but never made it to a floor vote (much to Bingaman and Murkowski’s chagrin). If Murkowski loses, Alaska loses a senator with seniority on energy issues, and that’s exactly the message Murkowski has been sending in campaign speeches.

California: Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) is in a tight race with her Republican opponent Carly Fiorina. Boxer is the head of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and has been a key player in drafting climate change legislation (remember the Kerry-Boxer bill?). But amid accusations that she is too partisan, Boxer played a largely behind-the-scenes role in the most recent Senate run at climate change legislation. Instead, a bipartisan trio of lawmakers — Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and, for a while a least, Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) — took the lead. Fiorina, for her part, has raised questions about climate science.

Colorado: This race is mostly important because of the extent to which environmentalists don’t want Sen. Michael Bennet’s (D-Colo.) opponent, Ken Buck, to win. The League of Conservation Voters and the Sierra Club have trashed Buck in ads, highlighting his comments questioning whether climate change is man-made. Environmentalists have made Buck the poster child of Republican climate skeptics running this cycle. For his part, Buck’s spokesman said his official position is this: “Ken believes climate change is occurring, but that it’s natural more than man-made.” Bennet, for his part, has said he does not support the House version of cap-and-trade, but his campaign said recently that he would support a “well-thought-out, market-based bill.” Buck’s campaign jumped on the comments, saying Bennet’s position on the issue is unclear.

Nevada: Sen. Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) re-election bid has to make pretty much every one of these lists because, well, he’s the Senate majority leader. His opponent, Tea Party darling Sharron Angle, is slightly ahead in polls. While Reid has faced some criticism from environmentalists, often not in public, for being too hesitant to move forward on climate and energy legislation, most fear the implications of a loss by Reid. Though prospects for a comprehensive climate bill are next to non-existent in the next two years, environmentalists are hoping to pass a number of energy/environment bills next year, including proposals to incentivize electric vehicles, weatherize homes, respond to the oil spill and require that a certain portion of the country’s electricity come from renewable sources like wind and solar.

House:

VA-5: Freshman Rep. Tom Perriello is in a tight race against state Sen. Robert Hurt (R). The Perriello race is seen by many Republicans as a referendum on President Obama’s policies. Perriello, from a conservative Southern Virginia district, voted for both cap-and-trade and the health care bill and has been taking flack at home for it. In an attempt to come to Perriello’s rescue, environmentalists have run ads criticizing Hurt as a friend of big oil. Even President Obama got in on the action, campaigning for Perriello late last week.

MN-8: Rep. James Oberstar (D-Minn.), who chairs the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, is in a nail biter against his Republican challenger, Chip Cravaack. The latest polls show the race incredibly tight. Oberstar, as head of the transportation panel, is one of the key lawmakers charged with reviewing pipeline safety in the aftermath of a massive oil pipeline spill in Michigan and a natural gas pipeline explosion in California.

Proposition 23:

While the latest polling says that Prop 23, which would essentially overturn California’s landmark climate change law, will fail, it’s still on our radar.

Proposition 26:

The lesser-known California ballot initiative, Prop 26 would require a two-thirds majority vote for the state legislature to impose any new fee on industry. If it passes, it could also impact the state’s climate law because it would make it difficult to enforce through the legislature, the Los Angeles Times notes.

The atmosphere is very different from a year ago, when U.S. negotiators headed to Copenhagen touting the recent success of a House-passed climate bill. Now that legislation has died in the Senate, and with candidates poised to win this week who are more likely to focus on immediate economic concerns than on long-term environmental and energy ones, these constraints are shaping U.S. climate diplomacy.

Given the minimal chances that a climate bill can pass the Senate anytime soon, the Obama administration must convince negotiators at the conference that it will address greenhouse gas emissions through regulation, rather than legislation. Expect U.S. negotiators to enumerate the climate-related regulations it has passed in recent months, including new limits on greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles.

At the same time, the administration is set to release new ozone standards before the talks and is preparing new greenhouse gas emission limits on stationary sources. The message U.S. negotiators will bring to Cancun is this: The lack of progress in the Senate on climate change is not going to keep us from reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. We are committed to exercising our regulatory authority now and passing a strong climate when possible.

Whether that will be enough is another question. Other countries are wary about the U.S. commitment to addressing climate change. And this certainly isn’t going to help.

From the Post story:

Administration officials might not be able to deliver on all the climate assistance they have promised to give poor countries by 2012 and have questioned some financing proposals linked to longer-term foreign aid. They are considering whether to challenge China’s renewable energy subsidies as violating international trade rules, and have objected to Europe’s plan to force airlines operating there to pay for their carbon emissions.

Barnes, speaking at The Atlantic’s Green Intelligence Forum today, said that health care reform was one of Obama’s top priorities during the campaign. “One of the things that we heard is that we had to deal with the issue of health care,” she said.

Barnes also demurred on the question of a climate and energy bill’s legislative prospects. “One of the things that I’ve learned is that when you start to put your money down on when Congress will act, you’re going to lose your money,” she said. But she stressed that while Congress was far from “crossing the finish line” on a climate bill, the Obama administration is committed to using its regulatory authority, at the Environmental Protection Agency and elsewhere, to address climate change.

Barnes expressed frustration with those who oppose measures to address climate change. ”There is no debate globally about the importance of this issue, it’s when we return home that we are pushing and shoving and trying to convince people of the importance of this issue,” she said. But she added that she is seeing a shift in the viewpoint of the American people on climate change, though she acknowledged that many Americans still question the science of climate change.

“Even if you, for whatever reason, don’t believe the science, you’ve got to believe the economic imperative of a clean energy economy,” she said.

Obama’s visit comes just days before the midterm elections. Perriello is in a tight race with his Republican opponent, state Sen. Robert Hurt. Hurt has criticized Perriello for being the “rubber stamp” of the Obama administration and the visit will likely play into those criticisms. Perriello, a freshman Democrat, has caught flack in his conservative Virginia district for voting for the House health care and cap-and-trade bills.

From the Globe:

Yet even as scientists confirm the extraordinary success of the 1990 acid rain legislation, some say its lessons are being ignored. Politicians failed this year to pass legislation on the wider threat of global warming in large part because of Republican ridicule of the bill’s “cap-and-trade’’ approach — capping emissions and letting companies trade credits earned by cutting pollution. Yet it was a similar strategy, devised by a Republican president, that solved the acid rain puzzle.

The effort to pass an acid rain cap-and-trade program, which was masterminded by George H. W. Bush, faced the same criticisms that a cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gas emissions faces today: It will ruin the economy, opponents said then, and say now. But, in the end, the program did not result in such far-reaching economic impacts.

According to the Globe:

An American Electric Power official told the Globe the legislation could lead to “the potential destruction of the Midwest economy.’’ Such fears proved wildly overblown. The $2 billion annual cost of the acid rain controls is about one-fourth the initial estimate, due in part to the lower-than-expected cost of controlling pollution. Competition sprang up to produce highly efficient, lower-cost scrubbers, and rail lines competed to bring lower-sulfur coal from Western states to the Midwest.

So, what makes this time different? Why did the acid rain program succeed while the cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gas emissions went down in a ball of flames in the Senate?

One reason the Globe offers — and it’s been echoed by others — is that President Obama did not offer a clear plan from which Congress could work.

The Globe says:

Republicans say the Obama administration should have taken a lesson from the way Bush pushed the acid rain bill.  Bush staked out a clear position, filing a bill that called for halving emissions, and using it as a basis for negotiations with Congress. “A president has to lead — and at times be firm,’’ Bush said in the interview. “Once we achieved our key objectives, we were more open to compromise to get a final bill passed.’’  Obama, by contrast, did not send a climate-change bill to Congress. Instead, he laid out key concepts and urged legislators to work out their differences.

He says:

Democrats connected with the White House say that Carol Browner, currently, the president’s senior adviser on energy and the environment, and the former EPA secretary under President Clinton, is a plausible candidate to be appointed White House chief of staff next year.

Ambinder offers a number of reasons why Obama might choose Browner. “She has more than enough experience dealing with Congress, with the rest of the government, and is a subject matter expert on the subject that will occupy a considerable amount of the President’s attention in the next two years,” he notes. In addition, he says she “supervised the response to the BP oil well spill, and the President is said to think that she did a terrific job with the limited sets of tools the government turned out to have.”

But he doesn’t address a couple of reasons why Obama would pass over Browner for the position. While she has been praised for her work on the oil spill response, she mischaracterized a key administration report on the amount of oil left in the Gulf after the spill.

A draft staff report on the administration’s oil spill response named Browner specifically in its criticism of the report, known as the “Oil Budget.”

Ms. Browner did not describe the Oil Budget as an operational tool designed to assist responders. Instead, some of her statements presented the budget as a scientific assessment of how much of the oil was “gone.” [...]

In addition, Ms. Browner and [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Administrator Jane Lubchenco] emphasized that the report was “peer-review[ed]” by federal and non-federal scientists. These references to peer review by two senior officials in a White House press briefing likely contributed to public perception of the budget?s findings as more exact and complete than the budget, as an operational tool, was designed to be.

At the same time, she is deeply unpopular with many Republicans, who have targeted her in their criticism of the administration’s so-called policy “czars,” key advisers who require no Senate confirmation.

LCV President Gene Karpinski told reporters today that Prop 23 is “the single most important race in the country.” Polling on the ballot measure has been tight.

If passed, Prop 23 would effectively overturn California’s landmark global warming legislation. Oil industry groups have spent millions of dollars lobbying for passage of the ballot initiative. Environmental groups have countered with their own campaign to reject Prop 23. LCV and its sister organization, LCV Education Fund, have spent more than $1.2 million to build opposition to the ballot measure.

LCV has also given more than $1 million this year to congressional candidates. That’s more than in 2008 and almost double the amount the group gave in 2006, Karpinski told reporters today.

The group has released a number of television ads targeting key candidates. Yesterday, LCV released an ad targeting Robert Hurt, the Republican running against Rep. Tom Perriello (D) in Virginia’s fifth district. And today it launched two new ads, one criticizing Ken Buck, the Republican candidate for the Colorado Senate seat, and another railing against Joe Heck, the Republican running against Rep. Dina Titus (D) in Nevada’s third district.

LCV’s Dirty Dozen list includes Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), Christine O’Donnell, the Republican nominee for the Delaware Senate seat, and Carly Fiorina, the Republican nominee for the California Senate seat.

Here’s a list of the Senate and House candidates who have received the most money from LCV:

Senate Candidates
Robin Carnahan (MO) $63,053.56
Barbara Boxer (CA) $58,977.93
Harry Reid (NV) $58,008.17
Michael Bennet (CO) $44,948.51
Paul Hodes (NH) $44,724.18
Joe Sestak (PA) $39,961.41
Russ Feingold (WI) $34,864.85
Patty Murray (WA) $30,381.74
Alexi Giannoulias (IL) $21,536.16

House Candidates
Tom Perriello (VA-05) $51,941.42
Betsy Markey (CO-04) $37,735.10
Martin Heinrich (NM-01) $32,188.41
Dina Titus (NV-03) $24,553.03
Carol Shea-Porter (NH-01) $24,525.41
Mark Schauer (MI-07) $23,789.48
John Boccieri (OH-16) $22,955.18