Regan Lachapelle, Reid’s spokeswoman, said canceling the cloture vote on the bill, set for tomorrow, in favor of continuing discussion with Republicans will give the legislation a better chance of passing before the end of the year.

Lachapelle’s full email statement:

There have been some positive discussions with Republicans about moving forward on the natural gas and electric vehicles legislation. Senator Reid has talked to Senator [Orrin Hatch (R-Utah)] and others and thinks that vitiating the cloture vote at this point would increase the chances that we’ll be able to get a bipartisan agreement to pass this important legislation  before the end of the year.

The bill is considered one of the only energy-related measures that could move during the lame-duck session. The delay raises questions about whether the bill can gain the necessary support for passage. It’s also worth noting that it’s not just Republicans who are raising questions about the bill. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) has said he will oppose the bill unless provisions that encourage ethanol development are added.

Though he doesn’t specifically mention cap-and-trade or climate science, he said he would work to overturn President Obama’s “job-killing policies” and ensure there is oversight for “every program.”

In the letter, which makes Upton’s candidacy for the committee chairmanship official, Upton tells his fellow Republicans that he:

WILL work with all the members of our Conference as one team;
WILL pass legislation to repeal ObamaCare;
WILL conduct rigorous oversight of every program, budget, regulation and agency
within our jurisdiction;
WILL aggressively cut spending by adopting new Committee rules to foster spending
cuts and eliminate government programs; and
WILL protect the sanctity of human life by rigorous oversight and passing legislation
to permanently ensure that no federal funds go toward abortion, including:  Rep. Joe
Pitts’ Protect Life Act and Rep. Chris Smith’s No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act.

But the letter does not lay out an energy agenda, nor does it address climate change. The letter is the latest effort by Upton to talk up his conservative credentials, amid criticism by some Republicans that he’s too moderate. In fact, some conservatives have even criticized Upton for his support for phasing out incandescent light bulbs in favor of more efficient ones.

But there was some good news for Upton today. Fred Barnes, executive editor of The Weekly Standard, voiced his support for Upton in a story this afternoon. “I know Upton quite well. He’s not as conservative as I am,” he wrote. “But he is especially well suited to be chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee. On the issues the committee will take up, he is conservative. Republicans shouldn’t let a silly light bulb bill keep him from becoming chairman.”

Reps. Joe Barton (R-Texas), John Shimkus (R-Ill.) and Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) are also hoping to get the chairmanship.

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.

One clean energy advocate with close ties to Congress tells me, “Little will happen, probably.”

I put the question to Regan Lachapelle, spokeswoman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. She said:

We filed cloture on a motion to proceed to a natural gas bill before we left. Other than that, we have many items that are possible for consideration during the lame duck.

Lachapelle did not elaborate on which pieces of legislation she was referring to.

“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.

Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), the most senior Republican on the committee, made it known tonight that he wants the spot, even though he must secure a waiver to take over the chairmanship because he’s already served three terms as the top GOP member of the panel. He told The Hill tonight that he will seek such a waiver.

Though Barton said he wants the chairmanship, many Republicans have privately raised concerns about putting Barton in the role. They point to an incident earlier this year when he appeared to apologize to BP for the way the Obama administration treated the company after the spill. Press reports indicate that Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) would also like to take over the chairmanship of the committee.

Here’s more on energy committee musical chairs, from a post I wrote last week.

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.

He traces the oil spill narrative roughly like this: Outcry about the environmental effects of the spill turned into concerns about the moratorium on drilling, which, when the moratorium was lifted, turned into everybody moving on to something else.

At first, it seemed like an inevitability that the oil spill would become a major issue in the midterm elections. And in some cases it was — Grimm points to Florida Gov. Charlie Crist’s early Senate campaign rhetoric on the environmental impacts of the spill, and I’ve written before about how Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) and Rep. Charlie Melancon (D-La.) zeroed in on the drilling moratorium.

But oil spill rhetoric has faded significantly for a number of reasons. The first is time. It’s been more than six months since the spill, and the incident rarely gets front-page billing these days. The second, as Grimm points out, is the administration’s decision to overturn the moratorium. The decision took some of the wind out of arguments that the administration was destroying the Gulf economy, though Sens. Vitter and Mary Landrieu (D-La.) have both raised concerns that new drilling rules will slow the pace of new drilling.

The third is a little more complicated. On the one hand, many Democrats seem reluctant to make the oil spill an election issue, because in doing so, they would have to acknowledge one embarrassing little detail: The Senate has failed to pass an oil spill response bill. On the other hand, many Republicans would have to reconcile their support for expanded offshore drilling with the obvious safety concerns. At the end of the day, it’s a thorny issue for both sides of the aisle.

After the midterms, once our elected officials trek back to D.C. to do the less glamorous job of legislating, the big question is this: How will Congress deal with offshore drilling? Right now, it’s unclear. The momentum to pass an oil spill response bill is gone, and with it go the prospects that we’ll see stand-alone legislation on the issue. While it could come up in the lame-duck session, it seems more likely that oil spill response provisions will make their way into a broader energy bill next year that will focus on low-hanging fruit issues like electric vehicles and efficiency, possibly paired with a renewable energy standard. Of course, the outcome of the midterm elections will likely determine the lame-duck agenda.

Just how stringent oil spill response provisions will be depends largely on the outcome of behind-the-scenes liability negotiations between, among others, Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), who would prefer unlimited liability on any company responsible for a spill, and Sens. Landrieu and Mark Begich (D-Alaska), who are trying to devise a mechanism by which companies can pool their liability in the event of a large disaster.

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.

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.