Hagel still seeks support from fmr colleagues

>>> president obama has made climate change a top priority of his second term. to achieve hits goals he'll immediate help from republicans. especially lisa murkowski who has new proposals of her own. you were talking to some reporters on the hell. do you think this is another signal that our infrastructure is desperately under resourced got an ener gy problem? you know, a real crisis that is facing the country? what are your proposals?

>> well, i tell you, when it comes to reliability, all you need to do is ask those millions of americans who were focused on the game last night and all of a sudden it wasn't there. so as we look to energy and the key role that it plays in a secure economy, i think you immediate to look no further than the inconvenience that people felt last night. we rolled out an energy proposal this morning that we've been working on for well over a year, and the basic premise is energy is good. pretty simple. manager is good. it's necessary. it defines who we are as a nation. what i am working towards is a proposal that gets under the circumstances to a policy that is affordable, it's abundant, it's clean, it's diverse, and it's secure. if we can work towards all those things, we actually get to a better climate, a better environment. just a place where we are stronger as a nation, and where we're cleaner environmentally as a nation.

>> you are talking about drilling. when the president and certainly the incoming secretary of state who has been a leader on climate change is talking about doing something about greenhouse gases , haven't the storms, superstorm sandy, irene last year, haven't all of these recent storms and the fluctuations in temperature taught us if nothing else, that we have a real climate problem and that we have to deal with this here even if the rest of the world isn't going to deal with it in china and elsewhere?

>> when you say i'm talking about drilling, think about what we're drilling for right now. think about where the boom is in this country. it's with natural gas . in order to access that natural gas , you do have to drill. what it has yaelded this country is an abundance of a resource that they read. it's able to bring our cost down and able to bring about jobs and economic opportunity that we wouldn't have had. how do we pay for the damage caused by a sandy? how do we move towards that next generation of technology if we don't have the resources that we need? we can gain those through our own domestic production and we can put revenues towards a renewable manager deployment fund, towards mitigating some of what we are seeing from impact of climate. we talk about climate change being important for the future. we have to make sure that for the present our children are not in poverty that, we have the economic resources to do what it is that we need to do. so let's develop what we have, which is an abundance of natural resource and let's use that to get us to the energy of the future. that builds a cleaner climate.

>> this is a debate over methane that comes from the fracking from the natural gas debate that we'll have to continue, but before i let you go, i do want to ask you about chuck hagel because your vote -- you were on the committee. your vote is going to be clearly to -- mike johansson joined over the weekend, senator thad cochran from mississippi. are you prepared to support chuck hagel ?

>> well, in fact, i'm not on the committee, so i wasn't able to be there and be a participant when senator hagel spent eight hours before the armed services committee . what i have been doing over the weekend in between focus on an energy plan roll-out that we advance today is i caught many of the news snip ets, of course, that give me some concern. i'll be very honest with you. i have to acknowledge that what we have seen come out of the news have been some of the more dramatic moments, some of the moments where clearly senator hagel displayed a weakness. i have concerns about that. but i've got to do my homework. i intend to do just that.

>> carl levin had been counting on you as a yea and not a nay. you worked closely with chuck hagel before when he was in the senate.

>> i did.

>> do you think likely you can overcome your concerns? can he persuade you? have you had a one-on-one meeting with him?

>> i had a very good one-on-one meeting with senator hagel some weeks ago. i had an opportunity to ask some pretty direct questions, and i'll be up front with you, in those -- in that exchange he did a lot to alay the concerns that i have. what troubles me now is in view of what i have seen, albeit somewhat truncated here, with his performance before the committee last week, i need to go back and gain assurance that there was a level of consistency, and right now i can tell i don't have that, so --

>> thank you very much, lisa.