“My hope is that from this success in the foreign policy arena two days ago, that he will be emboldened to take once again to the Congress legislation — not just to increase a renewable energy standard — but climate change legislation that this country and the world need,” Richardson said.

The foreign policy success that Richardson referred to was the death of Osama bin Laden, who was killed by United States forces in Pakistan on Sunday.

Before being elected New Mexico’s governor in 2002, Richardson served in Congress, as the Secretary of Energy and as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations.

Any climate legislation would face an uphill battle in the current Congress. Republicans control the House of Representatives, and the Senate was unable to reach 60 votes on climate legislation in the last Congress, which had a much higher percentage of Democrats.

“I don’t think there’s anybody in America that thinks we’ve got an energy policy that’s working,” Obama said, specifically citing natural gas vehicles and the use of natural gas as overlapping priorities of Republicans and Democrats.

The big question, as Obama put it, is: “How do we move forward on that agenda?”

It’s true that there are overlapping priorities, but as I reported today, it’s still going to be an uphill climb to pass significant energy legislation in the next Congress, given massive Republican gains in the House and Senate.

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.

“Investing $100bn annually would mean that we could essentially resolve the climate change problem by the end of this century,” Lomborg’s book says, according to The Guardian.

Lomborg’s change of heart is already getting a lot of attention. But it seems unlikely to have a substantial impact on, say, the U.S. Congress, which for years has tried and failed to pass cap-and-trade legislation, despite ample warning of the dangers of climate change.

The Hill reported late last night that Kerry and Lieberman will meet with environmental leaders “to discuss a final push to price carbon.”

The meeting comes after Senate staff met at the White House last Thursday with officials from the Edison Electric Institute, a leading trade group representing utilities, The Hill says.

Kerry and Lieberman are expected this week to shop a “utility first” bill around to various Senate offices, an attempt to revive some form of carbon cap. Sources on and off the Hill say Kerry has met with Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) to get input on the proposal in hopes of gaining her endorsement. While the details of the bill remain unclear, it appears likely that it will, at least in the short term, cap emissions from electric utilities only.

I just got off the phone with Rob Gramlich, a senior vice president for policy at the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), the leading lobbying group for the U.S. wind industry. He says wind industry CEOs are preparing to lobby senators in the coming days to strengthen key provisions in climate and energy legislation that could benefit the industry.

AWEA is calling for an increase in the so-called renewable electricity standard (RES) included in various energy and climate proposals currently on the table. A federal RES would require that a certain percentage of the country’s electricity be produced from renewable sources like wind and solar.

Without the votes for an economy-wide cap on carbon emissions, an RES appears likely to be one of the central provisions in a climate and energy package, leaving liberal Democrats with the task of claiming victory on a bill that falls far short of their policy goals.

AWEA is working to increase the RES well above the requirement included in the energy bill passed by the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee last year, which calls for 15 percent of the nation’s electricity to come from renewables by 2021. The group is advocating for a proposal to increase the RES to 25 percent by 2025.

Gramlich says the group will be targeting farm-state Democrats and Republicans in wind-rich regions, dispatching the heads of number of major wind developers to lobby key senators.

“There are a number of swing vote members who could come onto the legislation, there are farm-state Republicans who support wind energy in particular,” Gramlich said, arguing that a higher RES could help get 60 votes for an energy and climate bill.

But Republicans are also calling for a so-called “diverse” energy standard that would allow nuclear energy and coal with carbon capture technology to count in the overall standard, a proposal that rankles many in the wind industry. Sen. Richard Lugar’s (R-Ind.) energy proposal includes such a standard.

But there’s one major piece of pending legislation that deficit shouldn’t be able to knock down: the American Power Act. Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman’s (I-Conn.) comprehensive climate bill just received its score from the Congressional Budget Office. The verdict? It’ll reduce the deficit by $19 billion over the next 10 years.

Will that be enough to get the bill passed? Of course not. The very same centrist senators who frequently raise deficit concerns are wary of legislation that could raise energy prices, and so the APA appears all but dead. The question now is whether an energy and climate bill that places a cap on only the utilities sector can raise enough revenue to offset the clean energy incentives in the bill and maintain a deficit-cutting or deficit-neutral top line.

After the bill is drafted — whenever that may be — we’ll await the CBO verdict.

The move ups the pressure on lawmakers who prefer congressional action to EPA regulation but have been wary of carbon-pricing legislation. With the threat of EPA restrictions growing ever stronger, it’s getting increasingly difficult for these lawmakers to ignore the issue.

Equally important is the utilities sector, some of whose leaders have backed the notion of comprehensive climate legislation. But utility CEOs have been more skeptical of a bill that would impose emissions limits only on power plants.

A Senate aide familiar with the energy and climate negotiations tells me that the utilities are unlikely to sign on to any legislation that does not feature some guarantee that other sectors will be capped down the line, even if only utilities are subject to the cap at first.

But the utilities’ bargaining power is likely to diminish with each new EPA assertion of authority. Faced with a choice between EPA regulation and a bill that will put a price on their carbon emissions — but one that they can help shape — they’re likely to choose the latter.

For an energy and climate bill that’s still facing tough odds, the timing of the EPA’s announcement couldn’t have been better.

Snowe is a signaler: if she’s on board with a bill, then Sen. Susan Collins, Scott Brown, and George Voinovich would be inclined to vote for it, as would Florida’s George LeMieux, who doesn’t want to vote against a climate bill.

LeMieux is a particularly interesting case. A longtime loyal adviser to Gov. Charlie Crist (R-Fla.), LeMieux was appointed by his boss as a temporary placeholder until Crist could run for the Senate seat himself this November. Several months ago, when Crist’s Republican primary opponent Marco Rubio began to take a commanding lead in the polls, I speculated that while the need to move to the right against Rubio could cause Crist to nudge LeMieux away from the Democratic agenda on issues like climate change, a Crist loss in the primary would free LeMieux to vote his conscience — which, if his views are as aligned with Crist’s as people seem to think, could be a vote for climate legislation.

But the current scenario’s even better for climate bill advocates. As an independent in the race, Crist is now moving to the left as fast as he can in an attempt to position himself as the electable alternative to Rubio. And if LeMieux is truly trying to help him, a vote for the most important piece of environmental legislation in the country’s history could give Crist a substantial boost among Democratic voters.

Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.), the authors of a comprehensive climate bill, speak to reporters after they and other key senators met with President Obama on Tuesday. (epa/ZUMApress.com)

If President Obama hoped that his meeting with key senators on Tuesday would produce anything resembling a consensus on energy legislation, he came away disappointed. Democratic leaders emerged from the meeting expressing their grudging willingness to compromise further — provided some sort of emissions limits are put in place — while Republicans continued to hammer emissions controls as an “energy tax.”

[Environment1] But the events of the day may have brought some clarity to a point that has gradually emerged over the past two weeks: If the eventual energy bill is to include a price on carbon, it’s likely to affect the utilities sector only.

Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), a moderate Republican without whose support energy legislation stands virtually no chance of passing the Senate, issued a statement after the meeting expressing hesitation on an economy-wide carbon cap — a provision many scientists consider essential to efforts to fight global warming.

“On the complex and difficult question of curbing greenhouse gas emissions, there is no consensus at this time,” Snowe said. “From my perspective, I’ve long asserted that placing a price on carbon will send the appropriate signals to entrepreneurs that would unleash the innovation to position America as a global clean energy industry leader. However, today we are in different and perilous economic times. … We cannot afford economy-wide approaches to carbon reduction that could cost consumers another 18 cents per gallon of gasoline in this struggling economy or subject our manufacturing sector to unnecessary regulations when they’ve already reduced their emissions by five percent below 1990 levels.”

Her solution? “I believe that one possibility is to more narrowly target a carbon pricing program through a uniform nationwide system solely on the power sector which is the sector with the most to lose from the EPA regulations and it’s also the sector in which businesses actually make decisions today based on prices 20 to 30 years in the future.”

It’s hardly a new idea. Two weeks ago, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel proposed a utilities-only cap as a possible compromise solution. And last week, Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers, the most vocal advocate for climate legislation in the electricity industry, co-authored an op-ed in Politico in which he expressed openness to a carbon price for utilities alone — provided other sectors eventually follow.

“It’s time for all of us — politicians, business leaders and environmentalists — to put wishful thinking aside, establish realistic goals and develop a consensus for legislation that can be passed this year,” he wrote, along with Pew Center on Global Climate Change president Eileen Claussen. “If that means capping emissions from the utility sector first — so be it.”

But they added, “Electric utilities may be willing to go first. But they are not going to be willing to go alone.”

Exactly how other sectors would be added remains unclear.

“Some climate bills have featured a sort of Phase Two,” said Marchant Wentworth, deputy legislative director of the Union of Concerned Scientists, where other sectors are phased in “four, five, six years down the road.”

But Wentworth was skeptical that a utilities-only bill would be able to pass a Senate where Republican opposition to climate legislation has grown increasingly intense.

“Is there something unique about a utility-only bill that gets you more support in the Senate than a comprehensive bill?” he asked. “Can you get to 60 [votes] on utility-only? No.”

Still, for all the disappointment among environmentalists over the repeated compromises Democrats have made on climate legislation to win over moderates, some argue that a utilities-only cap would achieve most of the goals of an economy-wide carbon pricing scheme. The question now is whether Democratic leaders in the Senate can muster 60 votes for even a weakened bill to overcome a Republican filibuster.

The answer may be in the president’s hands — at least according to Senate Majority Harry Reid.

“I think it’s pretty clear we have to do something,” Reid said last week. “The question is, what do we do? Now, a lot of that depends on what the White House is going to do to help us get something done.”

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), a leading voice for strong climate action, thinks Obama took an important step in that direction in the meeting Tuesday.

“He didn’t lay out a recipe, but he made it clear that a price on carbon is a very powerful instrument,” Merkley told The Washington Post. “He said it’s a very important tool and one we should thoroughly explore. … He made a point of raising carbon pricing a number of times. I dont think he would have done so if that wasn’t very important to him.”

But the president himself equivocated on the need for a price on carbon following the meeting.

“The President told the Senators that he still believes the best way for us to transition to a clean energy economy is with a bill that makes clean energy the profitable kind of energy for America’s businesses by putting a price on pollution — because when companies pollute, they should be responsible for the costs to the environment and their contribution to climate change,” the White House said in a statement. “Not all of the Senators agreed with this approach, and the President welcomed other approaches and ideas that would take real steps to reduce our dependence on oil, create jobs, strengthen our national security and reduce the pollution in our atmosphere.”

The diversity of opinions on energy legislation notwithstanding, Obama remains optimistic about the prospects of a bill.

“The President is confident that we will be able to get something done this year,” the White House said.