Senator Kerry says climate bill unveiling soon

U.S. Sen. John Kerry reads a statement after a meeting Syria's President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus April 1, 2010.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Senator John Kerry on Wednesday brushed off setbacks to passing climate change legislation, saying he hoped to unveil a compromise bill soon while stressing that consumers would be protected from energy price hikes.

"I believe when we roll out a bill -- and we will roll it out very, very soon -- we are going to have a unique coalition," the Democratic senator said during a speech at a conference on creating new "green" jobs in the United States.

Kerry's optimism, which has held through more than seven months of difficult negotiations in the Senate on how to reduce domestic pollution blamed for global warming, came as some in Congress were saying the effort was dead.

In recent days, Kerry has faced two possibly insurmountable problems. The only Senate Republican willing to negotiate a climate bill with him, Lindsey Graham, dropped out of the effort, ostensibly over an unrelated tiff on immigration reform. Also, a Gulf of Mexico oil spill has brought serious new questions about the kind of expanded offshore oil drilling the compromise climate bill would foster.

After his speech, Kerry said Graham "is standing by the work product and he is standing by the bill" that the two senators negotiated with independent Senator Joseph Lieberman.

Kerry said when his bill is unveiled, it will have the support of electric utilities and the heads of other major polluting companies.

The legislation, which would try to reduce carbon dioxide and other pollution sent into the atmosphere by 17 percent by 2020, from 2005 levels.

It would require electric power utilities to acquire an ever-declining number of pollution permits for each ton of carbon they emit.

"Oil companies are prepared in this bill to pay a pollution charge directly to the government and that money goes back to you," Kerry said, referring to consumers. That "charge" is expected to be levied on oil refiners.

He said "two-thirds of every dollar raised in the course of this effort goes straight back to the American consumer on their energy bill."

After a while, Kerry said that nearly all the revenues collected by the government under the carbon-control program would go back to consumers. In the early years, Washington would use some of the money to encourage energy efficiency and spur development of new technologies, he told the Good Jobs, Green Jobs National Conference sponsored by environmentalists and labor groups.

Manufacturers, including energy-intensive steel, paper and chemical factories, would not face pollution-reduction requirements until 2016, Kerry said.

The climate bill also will encourage the conversion to natural gas for fueling some heavy-duty trucks, Kerry said, discussing an idea backed by Texas energy tycoon T. Boone Pickens, who has invested heavily in natural gas.

(Editing by Bill Trott)