Obama cites gulf oil spill and promises fight for climate bill

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The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico should inspire the U.S. to cut its reliance on fossil fuels, President Obama said Wednesday, issuing his strongest promise yet to fight for Senate passage of a climate bill.

Obama told an audience of students and faculty that the only way the country would ever transition to clean energy was if the private sector had to pay a price for carbon pollution. The House already has passed a bill designed to do that, and a similar plan is pending before the Senate, but passage is imperiled by a flood of issues competing for attention this election year.

“I want you to know the votes may not be there right now, but I intend to find them in the coming months,” Obama told an audience of 300 gathered at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “But we will get this done. The next generation will not be held hostage to energy sources from the last century.”

The promise came as an administration official tacitly acknowledged that, for the second time this year, the White House was discussing the possibility of canceling a presidential trip to Indonesia and Australia, over concerns about the Gulf Coast disaster. At the moment, the trip is still on Obama’s schedule.

At the same time, White House Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton said the Department of Justice was moving ahead with its criminal investigation of the spill, looking to see “what laws were broken and what possible steps need to be taken in order to make sure that the law is upheld.”

In his speech at the university, Obama said the long-term solution lay in a wholesale change in the energy formula.

“The catastrophe unfolding in the gulf right now may prove to be a result of human error or corporations taking dangerous shortcuts that compromised safety,” Obama said. “But we have to acknowledge that there are inherent risks to drilling four miles beneath the surface of the Earth, risks that are bound to increase the harder oil extraction becomes.”

The time has come for the country to embrace “a clean-energy future,” he said.

“That means continuing our unprecedented effort to make everything from our homes and businesses to our cars and trucks more energy efficient,” Obama said. “It means tapping into our natural-gas reserves and moving ahead with our plan to expand our nation’s fleet of nuclear-power plants. And it means rolling back billions of dollars in tax breaks to oil companies so we can prioritize investments in clean-energy research and development.”

-- Christi Parsons, reporting from Pittsburgh