Washington (Platts)--27Jan2010/556 pm EST/2256 GMT

With the US Congress unable so far to pass a climate-change bill, a senior White House official on Wednesday said business leaders are privately telling her the lack of "regulatory certainty" is causing them to delay investments in energy projects that would create jobs and help the US recover.

Carol Browner, President Barack Obama's chief climate change and energy adviser, said many business leaders have told her in closed-door meetings that they want Congress to find a way to cap industrial greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, oil refineries and other sectors of the economy.

"There's a real reluctance in making capital investments until you know what the rules of the road are going to be," Browner said at a climate-change forum in Washington. "They're asking for regulatory certainty."

Browner did not identify the business leaders she has spoken with, nor did she describe the type of climate-change controls they are seeking.

She said the administration continues to believe the best way to address climate change would be for Congress to pass comprehensive legislation covering all sectors of the economy. But Browner said that if both the House and the Senate fail to accomplish that task, the White House intends to continue to use its executive-branch powers, such as administrative rulemakings and the federal budget process, to shift the US to a lower-carbon energy sector.

"We have a whole set of tools that are available to us in the executive branch," Browner said.

She said the administration has already made significant progress in developing low-carbon sources of energy through the investments made under the $787 billion economic stimulus bill Congress passed last year. That bill gave the Department of Energy about $40 billion to spend on wind and solar power, biofuels, and more efficient motor vehicles, among other things.

"When you look at the last year, we feel we really put in place the principles for a fundamentally different energy future," Browner said.

But Browner did not mention the administration's most controversial effort to combat climate change -- an initiative by the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate GHG emission from power plants and other large stationary sources using its existing rulemaking authority.

A coalition of industry groups is suing EPA over that effort, and host of Republican senators -- along with at least three Senate Democrats -- are supporting legislation that would block EPA from regulating GHGs.

Speaking at the same forum as Browner, Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who is working with several other lawmakers to craft a climate-change bill capable of passing the Senate, said allowing EPA to regulate greenhouse gases would cause further harm to the US economy.

"I believe it's better for the Congress to regulate than it is for the EPA," Graham told the same forum.

But he acknowledged that to date, none of the climate-change bills circulating on Capitol Hill could attract the 60 votes needed to prevent a Republican-led filibuster in the Senate. He said he and others are trying to obtain enough votes by developing a compromise bill that would provide additional federal support for nuclear energy, as well as open new areas of the Outer Continental Shelf to oil and natural gas drilling.

While he said adding language to a climate bill calling for expanded offshore drilling may be counter-intuitive, he explained that such an approach makes sense because "it's going to be a long time before we get away from carbon."

Graham said he has been trying to convince some of his Republican colleagues to sign on to a compromise climate bill, but he did not cite any progress on that front during his remarks.

--Brian Hansen, brian_hansen@platts.com