The Obama administration is confident it will help forge progress at climate-treaty talks this year in Copenhagen, Carol Browner, senior White House adviser on energy and the environment, said.

“We feel very, very confident that we can work with the rest of the world to take significant steps forward in Copenhagen,” Browner said in an interview.

Almost 200 countries will gather in Denmark in a bid to reach agreement on terms for a new accord to reduce greenhouse gases. The US never ratified the existing Kyoto treaty that expires in 2012, and is under fire because the Senate may not pass a climate bill before the two-week meeting starts on December 7.

Without clear guidance from the Senate, which must ratify treaties, President Barack Obama may be forced to send envoys to Copenhagen empty-handed, hurting the chance of countries reaching a deal.

The administration is “setting itself up to be the fall guy for failure in Copenhagen,” said Andrew Deutz, policy adviser for United Nations affairs at the Nature Conservancy, an environmental advocacy group in Arlington, Virginia.

Browner rejects such claims. “This administration from day one has been about taking action and we are still working very, very hard to get a bill out of the Senate,” she said in the interview on October 26.

The House passed its version of climate-change legislation in June.

Passing Senate energy and climate legislation remains possible this year, even as a debate over revamping the country’s health-care system dominates the congressional calendar, she said.

“We haven’t given up trying,” she said. “There are still windows where time could come available.”

US negotiators have said they are wary about signing off on a deal in Copenhagen and having it rejected by the Senate.

“We don’t want to repeat the Kyoto experience of having a number where there’s nothing behind it,” Obama’s climate envoy, Todd Stern, said on October 18 in London.

 In 1998, then-President Bill Clinton’s UN envoy Peter Burleigh signed the Kyoto Protocol only to have senators pass a resolution declaring they would reject any treaty that didn’t require developing nations such as China to cut emissions along with industrialized countries. 

“The US is haunted by the ghost of Kyoto,” Deutz said.

 The UN had set the Copenhagen meeting as a deadline for crafting a new treaty. The “serious money” is now betting that negotiations will have to continue beyond this year, Michael Levi, senior fellow for energy and environment at the Council on Foreign Relations, said last week at a conference in Washington.

“There’s no doubt that as long as the United States doesn’t have that legislative piece in place it lacks the ability to fully lead in the way that it needs to, and we aren’t going to have anything really come together until that’s in place,” he said.

 The administration will make its best case in Copenhagen even if the Senate fails to act by December, Stern said last month.

Along with talking about prospects for a climate bill, Browner said negotiators will be armed with a message about Obama’s commitment to tackling climate change and overhauling the way Americans use energy.

Obama’s actions so far include proposing the first national standard for greenhouse-gas emissions from automobiles and an economic stimulus bill, passed by Congress earlier this year, that includes almost $100 billion in “green” investments.

Ned Helme, president of the Center for Clean Air Policy in Washington, said it’s important that the administration make sure other countries are aware of what Obama has done.

“If this fails, all the fingers are going to be aimed at us,” Helme said. “That’s why we have to position ourselves better. We have a much better story to tell than we are telling.”  Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency said in April that greenhouse-gas pollution poses a danger, opening the way for new US regulation of cars, power plants and factories.

The decision is based on an April 2007 Supreme Court ruling that the government could limit greenhouse gases under federal law if it found them a danger to the public health and welfare. The high court ordered the EPA to make a determination. Former President George W. Bush declined to act, passing the issue on to Obama. (Bloomberg)