Members of Interfaith Power and Light unroll a 50-foot long list of signatures from people supporting climate change legislation.
Last year the U.S. House passed a cap-and-trade bill designed to cut emissions. This year, Sens. John Kerry and Joe Leiberman are behind a similar measure in the Senate. But they've run into objections from Republicans who say it amounts to a "carbon tax."
Sen. Susan Collins says she'll use the meeting with Obama to urge the president to get behind her plan for breaking the deadlock -- well, it's not entirely her plan.
I'm going to be strongly recommending to the president that he take a look, a closer look, at bi-partisan bill that Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell and I have introduced," Collins says.
She's talking about the CLEAR Act -- which stands for Carbon Limits and Energy for America's Renewal -- introduced in December. The proposal, says Collins is similar to existing cap-and-trade legislation in that it does put a cap on carbon emissions and thus puts a price on carbon pollution.
"But the big difference between our bill and the House-passed cap-and-trade bill, for example, is that it rebates to the American people 75 percent of the revenues that are generated from the auctions for carbon pollution permits," she says.
Collins says this means the average family of four in Maine would receive nearly $400 a year in dividends, which would help offset the expected price increases that will come from capping emissions. The other 25 percent of the auction revenues, says Collins, will be used to finance clean energy research and development.
Wednesday's meeting comes as pressure continues to mount on the Senate to break the deadlock over the climate bill. The latest group to join the is made up of religious leaders in Maine, who held a news conference to urge the state's two senators to pass a "strong climate and climate and energy bill."
Representatives from the Episcopal, Roman Catholic, Methodist and Unitarian Universalist churches gathered on the steps outside the First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church in Portland. They unrolled a 50 foot-long list containing 800 signatures from faith communities across the state.
The signatures were attached to a letter which, while it stopped short of endorsing a particular Senate bill, called on Sens. Collins and Snowe to pass legislation that places a cap on carbon emissions and promotes efficient and clean energy.
"All of us lead lives made more comfortable, immensely more convenient, by petroleum, and each of us at one time or another has wasted it," said Sam Saltonstall, president of Maine Interfaith Power and Light, an advocacy group that works with the state's diverse faith communities to promote green initiatives.
"As fossil fuels become scarce there are profound moral reasons for capping greenhouse gas emissions and moving to a clean energy economy," Saltonstall said.
Meanwhile, a survey published this week by CBS and the New York Times suggests that while the majority of Americans -- 58 percent -- want a fundamental overhaul of enegy policy, they don't want to pay for it. Fifty-one percent of those polled say they would oppose a gasoline tax that would pay for the development of renewable energy, compared to 45 percent who would support it.
Sen. Olympia Snowe's office did not respond to a request for comment for this story.