Juliet Eilperin

A bipartisan group of senators emerged Tuesday from a meeting with President Obama still divided over how to craft a climate and energy bill, with lawmakers predicting a scaled-back bill that would cap emissions from electric utilities rather than impose an economy-wide limit on greenhouse gases.

Last month Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) unveiled a bill along with Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) that includes the broader emissions cap along with subsidies for the nuclear industry and limits on the Environmental Protection Agency's ability to regulate carbon. He said in an interview they would make more concessions to win Republican support, but added, "My question is, which is the compromise of any of the others? Show me the compromise."

In an hour-and-a-half meeting, Obama urged the 23 senators to "aim high," several senators said. But Obama also made it clear "he wasn't putting out a particular recipe" for a bill, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) said. "The Senate is going to have to figure this out."

Two GOP senators -- Maine's Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe -- said they would support forcing emitters to pay for their carbon output. But many Republicans remained unconvinced.

Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the top Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said any measure that imposed mandatory limits on greenhouse gases and made emitters pay for carbon dioxide emissions "will not sell in this country." And Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), another member of the panel, said he told the president to focus instead on pouring federal dollars into energy research and development, building nuclear power plants and electrifying the nation's auto fleet.

Lawmakers discussed a more modest climate and energy bill that would target electric utilities and other stationary sources: power plants alone account for roughly 40 percent of the nation's greenhouse gas emissions. Snowe issued a statement after the meeting supporting such a plan.

However it is unclear whether there are sufficient votes for a utility-only carbon cap, said Joe Stanko, who heads government relations at the law firm Hunton & Williams. Major power companies probably would demand several concessions for backing the bill, including preemption from regulation under the Clean Air Act and new rules on mercury, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions.

And Collins, who has authored her own climate bill with Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) said she could only support a price on carbon if revenues from pollution allowances were returned to consumers. She added, "It's going to be very difficult" to find any bill that can muster 60 votes. "The White House meeting underscored to me how many diverse views there are on how to proceed with any clean energy bill."

Ralph Izzo, president and CEO of the New Jersey-based utility PSEG, said Tuesday his company could support a utilities-only bill: "It's a second-choice to economy-wide, but if you have to start with a single sector, this would be the logical sector to start with."

Environmentalists such as Joe Mendelson, director of global warming policy for the National Wildlife Federation, immediately questioned Republicans' resistance to a sweeping carbon cap.

"Republican leadership emerged from a meeting today saying nothing different than from a year ago," Mendelson said in a statement. "With a Gulf disaster and the public galvanized in favor of climate action, unfortunately they are still reading from Joe Barton's playbook."

But several senators made it clear in the meeting they did not feel compelled to meet environmentalists' expectations. At the outset of the meeting, according to sources who asked not to be identified because it was a private session, Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) suggested Kerry and Lieberman's climate bill should serve as the base text for a broad energy bill. After some senators objected to this plan, the group discussed having either an oil spill bill authored by Murkowski and Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) or an energy bill the two senators wrote serve as the base text.