Officially, Senator Boxer's Environment & Public Works committee will keep working on the American Climate & Energy Security Act (aka Waxman-Markey, HR 2454) up until Christmas. Unofficially, it's not going to happen this year...and that's very bad news for America's credibility at Copenhagen.
Official story from the Washington Post: instead of finishing the bill by early August, per Boxer's original deadline, the new deadline is early September.
"We'll do it as soon as we get back" from that break, Boxer told reporters. Asked if this delay jeopardizes chances the Senate will pass a bill this year, Boxer said, "Not a bit ... we'll be in (session) until Christmas, so I'm not worried about it."
But Boxer did not guarantee Congress will be able to finish a bill and deliver it to Obama by December, when he plans to attend an international summit on climate change in Copenhagen.
The reason, according to the Washington Post? Health care reform. Max Baucus is a key player on both bills. Obama wants to see both, but he wants health care reform to be passed first.
Meanwhile, Joe Klein at Swampland, who presumably is well sourced, writes:
As written, the Waxman-Markey bill will achieve very little in term of carbon reduction, could create a huge new bureaucracy to monitor emissions and will give polluters an excuse to raise rates unduly (although the various carrots included for alternative energy research and deployment are obviously worth enacting). According to several Administration sources, it's dead in the water for this year, in any case.
Emphasis mine.
I'm quite skeptical of Obama's professed desire to combat global warming. His speech and actions today at the G-8 summit contain the usual platitudes about the need to act, and he correctly acknowledges that the summit today is only one small step. However, if the United States can't complete a big step before Copenhagen, it's likely that Copenhagen will be yet another small step. Meanwhile, he's placing the politics of health care reform ahead of the science of the need to act on global warming, and chooses not to end mountaintop removal enhanced Appalachian surface coal removal. I'd like to think that Joe Klein's column is an indication that the Obama Administration will start again next year with a carbon tax, but I'm not optimistic. Boxer's decision to shelve ACES is really no surprise.