Washington: June 29, 2009 - IR Summary/NYT- President Obama on Sunday praised the energy bill passed by the House late last week as an “extraordinary first step,” but he spoke out against a provision that would impose trade penalties on countries that do not accept limits on global warming pollution.

“At a time when the economy worldwide is still deep in recession and we’ve seen a significant drop in global trade,” Mr. Obama said, “I think we have to be very careful about sending any protectionist signals out there.”

He added, “I think there may be other ways of doing it than with a tariff approach.”

The passage of the House bill on Friday night was an important, if tentative, victory for the president, becoming the first time either chamber of Congress had approved a mandatory ceiling on the gases linked to global warming.

Mr. Obama, hoping to build momentum in the Senate after the narrow victory in the House, delayed the start of a Sunday golf game to speak to a small group of reporters in the Oval Office.

He acknowledged that the initial targets for reducing emissions of heat-trapping gases set by the House bill were quite modest and would probably not satisfy the governments of other countries or many environmental groups. But he said he hoped to build on those early targets in fashioning a more robust program in the future as part of his administration’s efforts to move the nation from an economy based on fossil fuels toward one built on renewable energy sources.

Mr. Obama predicted that similar energy legislation would face a difficult slog through the Senate and require months of tough negotiations and additional compromises. The horse-trading and vote-buying that helped House leaders secure a 219-to-212 victory will be magnified in the Senate, where several powerful committee leaders are already asserting authority and Democratic moderates hold more power than their counterparts in the House.

Mr. Obama set no timetable for Senate action but exhorted its leadership to take the House bill as a benchmark and “seize the day.”

The president used the interview to put the House vote in the context of his broader efforts to modernize the American economy by shifting to cleaner and more efficient forms of energy. More