The chair of a Senate committee in charge of writing a global warming bill said there would be no effort to draft the legislation until September because the chamber is too busy grappling with how to write a massive health care reform bill.
The move could hurt President Barack Obama’s efforts at the climate change summit scheduled for December in Copenhagen, where he hopes to showcase an American climate change law to the international community.
Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., who leads the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said her panel would not take up the bill this month as she had planned.
Instead, Boxer said, the work would begin in September, after the Senate returns from the summer recess.
The Senate has already drafted a separate energy bill that calls for more domestic oil drilling.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the two bills would be combined for a Senate vote some time in the fall, but the climate bill delay could jeopardize that effort.
Part of the problem for Democrats is the push by some to include in the climate bill a cap and trade proposal that would require polluters to buy and trade costly permits. Such a bill passed narrowly in the House last month. But many Senate Democrats are opposed to cap and trade which guarantees Boxer would have a difficult time writing a bill that would pass the Senate.
But Boxer said she is delaying action because many of the lawmakers needed to negotiate a climate bill are tied up in the health care debate, including Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., who is working around the clock to come up with a bipartisan health care bill.
Baucus called the decision to delay the climate bill “wise.”
