WASHINGTON — President Obama's landmark energy and global warming bill squeaked through the House only after the White House made dozens of concessions to coal, manufacturing and other interests.
Now, as the battle moves to the Senate, Obama faces demands for even more concessions -- including pressure to open the nation's coastlines to offshore oil and gas drilling.
The Senate also will take up a series of controversial issues that were glossed over or omitted from the House legislation. Among them: giving the government sweeping powers to approve thousands of miles of new transmission lines to carry electric power to coastal cities from wind turbines in the upper Midwest and solar power generators in the Southwest, regardless of local objections.
Aware of the challenge, Obama repeatedly has called attention to the House achievement and urged the Senate to keep up the momentum.
"There are going to be a series of tough negotiations," he said last week. "But I think the ability of the House to move forward is going to be a prod for the Senate toward action."
Even so, with Republicans forming a near-solid phalanx of opposition and many Democrats concerned about the effects of specific sections of the bill on their constituents, the prospect is for a long, slow legislative process.
Senate leaders say they will benefit from lessons learned from the way House leaders built their majority. Chief among them: the need to cut specific deals to ease the effects of new emissions restrictions -- which could translate into higher costs for businesses and rising prices for consumers -- in particular parts of the country.
"We need to absolutely work this bill one on one," said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee that is drafting emissions limits, "because everybody's got different passions about it, different feelings about it, different hopes about it, different fears about it."
Making those deals is harder in the Senate than in the House, some analysts say.
"In the House, you can move blocks of votes," said Daniel Weiss, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress who works on global warming issues. "In the Senate, it's hand-to-hand combat."
Although a climate bill is expected to be hundreds of pages long, it will boil down to an attempt to start weaning the U.S. economy from dependence on fossil fuels.
