Senator John Kerry (2nd L), Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon (2nd R), and Senator Joesph Lieberman (L) and Senator Richard Lugar hold a joint press conference following a meeting on global climate change on Nov (Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images)
The proposed bill, headed by the Democrats, was pushed through the House of Representatives which passed the bill in June. However, the bill is being met with resistance in the Senate, where there are more Republicans than in the House. Many Republican senators felt that the bill, which asks consumers to pay higher prices for utilities, places limitations on economic growth.
As a result, Sen. Kerry said he would revise the bill and get more feedback from moderate and Republican senators.
Sen. Kerry, who heads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that legislation for the creation of new jobs and the health care bill takes precedence in the near future. Kerry added that the climate bill could potentially create many new jobs in the green tech industry because many businesses would invest in environmentally sound technology.
Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., one of the planners of the climate bill along with Sen. Kerry and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said, "We will go to Copenhagen with a House-passed climate change bill, some momentum in the Senate.”
Sen. Kerry, who will be a main representative for the U.S. at the Copenhagen talks, said they will try to get the outline of the bill before the Copenhagen summit and get it on the Senate floor “sometime in the early spring, as early as possible.”
Another energy bill, introduced by Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., and Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., contains a plan to increase nuclear power with “mini-Manhattan projects” and to increase solar power and other forms of sustainable energy.
In a recent meeting at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation,(APEC) many world leaders, including President Barack Obama, agreed that the Copenhagen summit that runs December 7-18, would only be a stepping stone towards enacting a real worldwide agreement to combat climate change. The Copenhagen summit would set an agreement to seal the deal at climate discussions in 2010.
The agreement, until this past weekend, was to cut global emissions by 50 percent by 2050. The new item on the agenda is reducing emissions by 25 percent by 2030.
