WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two senators leading the way on climate-change legislation have written a scaled-back bill that focuses largely on cutting carbon emissions by electric power utilities, according to a draft of the bill obtained by Reuters on Tuesday.
U.S. Senators John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman hope their proposal will be included in a larger bill to clamp down on offshore oil drilling in the wake of the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill and an initiative to expand the use of alternative energy.
But senior Democrats have not yet made a decision on whether to include the controversial climate change measure.
Senate Democrats hope to debate such a broad energy and environment bill on the Senate floor in coming weeks.
Kerry and Lieberman have retooled their original proposal after it failed to gain enough support for passage in the Senate in this congressional election year.
Their first draft bill called for setting specific targets for cutting emissions across all sectors of the U.S. economy, including automakers, oil refineries and industrial facilities in addition to utilities. The U.S. House passed a similar broad emission-cutting bill last year.
The new draft bill focuses on electric power utilities, requiring them to obtain pollution permits for the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions they spew into the air, which are blamed for global warming.
Those permits could be traded in a regulated market, with the goal of reducing utilities' carbon pollution by 17 percent by 2020, from 2005 levels. That was the same reduction they had for utilities in the original bill.
Earlier on Tuesday, President Barack Obama met Senate leaders to discuss the Senate's legislative agenda over the next few weeks.
The Senate's assistant majority leader, Dick Durbin, upon returning to Capitol Hill after that meeting, was asked by Reuters whether a carbon-pricing proposal, such as the Kerry-Lieberman bill, will be included in upcoming energy and environment legislation.
He responded, "The contents are still being debated" privately by senators.
Kerry, speaking to reporters, said: "We'll see where he (Reid) finally comes out...but I'm confident that there are going to be components of that in there." He was referring to his draft legislation.
"I'm very confident that we're going to have a comprehensive bill that will get us started in the right direction," Kerry said.
(Reporting by Richard Cowan and Thomas Ferraro; Editing by Bill Trott)
