WASHINGTON — Landmark legislation to combat global warming will also be a long-term boon to the U.S. economy, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse predicted yesterday, but in the short term it will disrupt and cost jobs in some industries.

However, “if we do it right,” he said of the legislation that passed a key Senate panel yesterday, the average American household budget will not suffer.

Democrat Whitehouse joined a majority of the Environment and Public Works Committee in approving the bill last night, with full Senate consideration likely next year.

He had supported a more sweeping plan to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and the other so-called greenhouse gases thought to cause global warming but supported the more modest bill that passed yesterday.

“Having it move forward is more valuable than stalling it [in committee] until it’s perfect by my standards,” Whitehouse said.

Whitehouse depicted himself as an enthusiastic adherent of the theory that — after some sharp economic dislocations in the near term — the new system of cutting greenhouse-gas emissions will do more than curb global warming. He said it should also force the marketplace to create cleaner energy sources and conservation tools that will be a long-term economic boon.

Whitehouse said there will be “industry-by-industry problems” of job losses as the new system pushes the economy away from the carbon-based energy sources.

He said workers at coal-burning power plants, for example, may suffer job losses. “It’s the problem that carriage-makers had when Henry Ford became successful.” Like the automobile of yore, the new energy system will be “good for the economy overall, but there are people who have real skills whose trade is put at risk.”

Further, Whitehouse said, “There’s no doubt that costs are going to rise” for gasoline and other carbon-based fuels, which is why he and other advocates of a campaign against global warming have also put mechanisms in the bill to cushion the blow on the poor.

But Americans will more than recoup what they lose from the short-term price hike in coal- and petroleum-based fuels, Whitehouse predicted, if the final legislation includes the proper mixture of tax credits for energy conservation, energy subsidies for poor people and other forms of government aid.

“There’s no reason you couldn’t blunt it really from the very beginning,” he said of the impact of higher carbon-based energy prices on average families.

But Whitehouse would not commit himself to opposing a bill that does not contain the subsidies and other cost-offsetting mechanisms that he favors. He reasoned that the cause of fighting climate change is too important.

In the long term, Whitehouse said the new system should force the creation of new, domestically produced energy sources and conservation tools that would improve the overall U.S. economy as well.

On the global-warming front, Whitehouse said he had two major concerns about the bill that passed yesterday: setting tougher standards than the bill now contains for reducing emissions, and a provision for further emission-cutting requirements if the new system as enacted proves ineffective against global warming.

One major topic of debate yesterday was the assumption of some of the bill’s supporters that more nuclear power — a clean source of energy, in the global warming sense — will be a major part of the new energy system created by the bill. Debate on how — if at all — to help develop more nuclear plants was put off until the floor debate.

“I’m not totally anti-nuclear,” Whitehouse said, calling nuclear power a possible “bridge” to provide the needed levels of new power “while other technologies, like carbon sequestration and higher-tech solar and wind and so forth, come on line.”

Whitehouse surmised that “if we were really energetic, we could do it without nuclear, without substantial additional nuclear capacity,” but he said he was willing to see a boost in nuclear energy if that was what the new marketplace ordains — providing the nation dealt with such issues as how to handle spent nuclear fuel.

Whitehouse said, however, that he would not want a nuclear power plant built in Rhode Island because of the density of the state’s population and its distance from any nuclear-waste disposal site.

On a voice vote, the panel adopted two Whitehouse amendments, among dozens considered during the marathon legislative drafting session. Taken together, they would provide money to protect coastal communities from the damage that climate change might wreak — such as rising tidal levels or more severe storms — and to study and plan for these problems.

jmulligan@belo-dc.com