Bush Defends Emissions Stance

By DOUGLAS JEHL

"I was responding to realities, and the reality is our nation has a real problem when it comes to energy," Mr. Bush told reporters in New Jersey today. 

White House officials said any plan to limit emissions of the gas, widely seen as a contributor to global warming, would have pushed electricity prices up, and could have compounded energy shortages like those being felt in California. They said Mr. Bush decided on Monday, hours before the White House announced the move, after concluding a week ago that the promise he had made in the campaign was "an error."

But many of Mr. Bush's supporters outside the White House said they had little doubt that the president's move also reflected the power of a last-minute pressure campaign from Congressional Republicans and industry leaders. Among the top corporate officials said by Washington lobbyists to have been in direct contact with either the president or Vice President Dick Cheney to win the turnabout was Tom Kuhn, a close friend of Mr. Bush's who is president of the Edison Electric Institute, the power plants' main lobbying organization.

"We had been convinced that we were done for," a top industry lobbyist said today of what he said was widespread resignation that Mr. Bush would honor his campaign promise, which called for mandatory reductions in power plants' emissions of the gas. Characterizing the lobbying of the last several weeks, this industry official said, "The very top people on our side were talking to the very highest levels of the administration."

Among people critical of Mr. Bush's move, several suggested in particular today that his diagnosis of "energy crisis" was overstated and was being offered at least in part as a cover for a decision driven by a desire to satisfy the oil and coal industries, the biggest beneficiaries of his decision, as well as to preserve good ties with their supporters on Capitol Hill.

"In every energy decision, politics plays a big role," said Bill Richardson, who was the Clinton administration's last energy secretary. "But the emissions decision is a particularly unfortunate one because it basically says we're for coal and not for any alternative, including natural gas, which should be our future source of energy in this country."

A decision to regulate power plants' emissions of carbon dioxide would have been felt most heavily by coal- and oil-burning plants, which are the largest emitters of the gas among the electric utilities. The adoption of the standards would have almost certainly resulted in a shift toward more widespread use of natural gas, a cleaner fuel, in power generation.

White House officials said today that such a shift would have taken place too quickly for the natural gas industry to come up with the supplies necessary to meet the new demand, and that higher prices would have resulted. But Skip Horvath, president of the Natural Gas Supply Association, said his industry regarded Mr. Bush's decision as a mistake.

"The policy seems to view a shift toward natural gas use as some kind of problem, and it seems to us that natural gas is the solution," Mr. Horvath said.

The energy problems now facing California have little to do with oil and coal because most of the state's electricity is generated from hydropower, nuclear power and natural-gas fired plants. But White House officials said Mr. Bush's comments about "an energy crisis" reflected a broader concern about the need to expand the domestic energy supply, by increasing production and use of all possible sources.

Mr. Bush's decision was warmly welcomed today by spokesmen for the oil and gas industries, as well as by a top official of the United States Chamber of Commerce, which had warned that any regulation of carbon dioxide emissions could have hurt the economy.

"It's very positive in that they've balanced environmental needs against our needs for energy security, and the decision is going to mean that we can both protect and begin increasing our domestic energy supplies," said the official, William L. Kovacs, the industry group's vice president for environment, technology and regulatory affairs.

The pressure on the White House to reverse Mr. Bush's decision began early this month, after Christie Whitman, the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, began publicly to describe the president's campaign pledge as if it were already policy.

Four Republican senators strongly opposed to regulation of carbon dioxide emissions, led by Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, then sent Mr. Bush a letter asking that he clarify his position. That set in motion an internal White House review and the furious lobbying effort that culminated in the policy shift on Tuesday, White House and industry officials said.

"It was very good that they made a swift decision here, rather than let this issue fester and fester," said John Grasser, a spokesman for the National Mining Association, the coal industry's main representative.

Environmentalists have been sharply critical of Mr. Bush's move, and some elaborated on their criticisms today, saying that the president had passed up an important chance to address the most dire problem facing the environment.

"The energy crisis we have is a short-term phenomenon, but the global warming phenomenon is a long-term issue, and what's important is to begin to put in place a solution that will reduce our consumption of fossil fuels and cut our emissions of carbon dioxide," said Michael Oppenheimer, chief scientist for Environmental Defense, a New York-based environmental group. 

A former Clinton administration official who was one of the chief State Department negotiators in recent talks aimed at completing a global warming treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, said today that Mr. Bush's decision would undercut efforts to find a solution to the problem.

"The only silver lining I can see here is that it makes things so stark and clear," said the official, David B. Sandalow. "There's not ambiguity, no attempt to greenwash this. He's just going back on his promise."