Eric Washburn, a partner at the energy and environment consulting firm Blue Water Strategies, said that enthusiasm in Congress seems to be flagging for passage of a cap-and-trade bill during an election year, despite the Obama administration's continued interest in doing so.

"Clearly they would like to see a broad, comprehensive energy and climate change bill get done this year," he said, but "it seems less and less likely that the politics are going to line up to do that."

Cap and trade was always going to be a hard sell in Congress, but the January 19 election of a Republican, Scott Brown, to a Massachusetts seat long held by liberal Democrat Edward Kennedy presents a new problem for the leading Democrats in the US Senate.

The Democratic majority needs 60 votes to move controversial legislation, like a mandatory response to climate change, and the result of the special election means there is one more vote to court.

Also, on January 21, the US Supreme Court ruled on a case that could allow private interest groups to invest in communications campaigns as a way to influence elections, a development that the president said over the weekend would impact his ability to pass a climate and energy bill.

In Washington, Democrats denied the electoral setback was a voter referendum on Obama's first year in office. Still, even before the upset in Massachusetts, Democrats at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue had refocused their attention and rhetoric on unemployment, rather than top wishlist items like healthcare and climate.

This emphasis seemed at least partly a reflection of public opinion; a poll released Monday by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press showed that 83% and 81% of Americans ranked the economy and jobs at the top of their list of priorities, respectively. Meanwhile, only 49% said addressing energy concerns was a high priority and only 28% said that climate was.

House of Representatives Republican Leader John Boehner argued Monday that voters' concerns with jobs were not reflected in Obama's priorities.

"It's the issue that the American people want us to focus on, not another stimulus bill that's a whole bunch of government spending, but actually putting money back in the hands of American families and small businesses," he said.

Republicans have cast climate, healthcare and other Democratic priorities as distractions from job creation, while Democrats and the Obama administration have argued that passage of bills tackling these priorities would boost employment.

Steve Cochran, director of climate change and the Environmental Defense Fund, said that the president would likely make a case for energy and climate change by linking them to higher polling issues.

A price on carbon might be unpalatable to some members of the president's audience Wednesday night, he said, but "if you talk about the benefits of the very same policy; energy security, jobs, a 'healthy' environment -- healthy rather than clean -- those are things that people support very strongly across the board."

--Jean Chemnick, jean_chemnick@platts.com