Browner: Climate Bill Unlikely By December; US Will Act One Way or Another

by Emily Gertz

categories: Greenhouse Gas, International Action, Policy & Legislation, Politics

Published October 02, 2009 @ 05:27PM PT

Above: Carol Browner on goals for December's climate treaty talks in Copenhagen.

President Obama's "climate czarina" told a Washington audience today that Senate passage of a climate bill in time for December's international climate talks was extremely unlikely.

Carol M. Browner, director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, said during the interview that "“Obviously we’d like to be through the process — that’s not going to happen,” reports Andrew Revkin in The New York Times. She continued, "I think we would all agree the likelihood you would have a bill signed by the president on comprehensive energy by the time we would go in early December is not likely."

The Senate version of the climate legislation was introduced only on Wednesday, a full three months after House passage of a climate bill. Yet Ms. Browner said that it was possible that the Senate could at least complete its rounds of hearings on the bill by the time the international climate talks open on Dec. 7 in Copenhagen. Those hearings, along with the Obama administration’s recent moves toward regulating greenhouse gases, would provide evidence that the nation is serious about cutting emissions, she said.

A show of resolve by the United States about doing its part in combating global warming is considered critical to the outcome of the Copenhagen talks.

“We will go to Copenhagen and manage with whatever we have,” Ms. Browner said.

Browner made her statement this morning at the First Draft of History Conference. Her comments made recently by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), as well as the growing "common wisdom" among politicos that between the domination of health care legislation in Congress, and the contention to come over the climate bill, that climate legislation won't make it to the president's desk before 2010.

If true, it makes Obama administration moves to regulate greenhouse gas pollution via the Clean Air Act even more important -- to curb climate change, demonstrate to negotiators in December that the US really will act on climate change, one way or another.

Further, "We need to give the business community certainty and predictability," Browner said today, to achieve "a whole new generation of jobs and a [stable] climate."
Per Joshua Green's write-up at the Atlantic,

To this she added the underappreciated point that the history of major changes in U.S. environmental law shows that new rules invariably turn out to be cheaper and easier to implement than almost anyone anticipates at the time.