Senate May Pass U.S. Climate Bill, Reject Treaty, Kerry Says

By Jim Efstathiou Jr. and Daniel Whitten

July 2 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Senate may pass legislation to slow climate change and then fail to approve a global treaty that commits nations to do so, Senator John Kerry said.

Kerry, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, will be a leader in Senate efforts to place the first domestic curbs on greenhouse gases, after the House approved a measure last week. Even if a Senate bill passes, there may not be enough support to ratify an international accord incorporating the U.S. commitments, the Massachusetts Democrat said in an interview.

A possible Senate rejection poses a threat to the 192- nation effort to forge an agreement, which scientists say can help slow warming that’s raising sea levels and changing rainfall patterns globally.

“We are definitely going to make more progress if there is a strong international agreement that the U.S. is a party to,” said Nigel Purvis, who in the 1990s worked as a U.S. negotiator on the Kyoto climate treaty that the U.S. didn’t ratify. Passing domestic climate-change legislation remains the most crucial step, Purvis said.

Senate ratification of a treaty would require 67 votes, compared with 60 for legislation.

“Sixty-seven votes is a big target here,” Kerry said last week, before Congress left for a one-week break. “We may be able to pass something that puts America on track to accomplish our set of goals. But we may pass it with 60 votes, or 61 or whatever, and that’s not 67.”

House Measure

The House approved climate-change legislation last week on a 219-212 vote. The measure would create a cap-and-trade system to curb emissions, establish a market for trading pollution allowances, and fund investments in new energy sources. It aims to cut fossil-fuel emissions from power plants, factories, oil refineries and vehicles 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.

Senate leaders say they hope to complete their version before talks on a global climate treaty in December in Copenhagen. Twenty senators led by Kerry and Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat who heads the Environment and Public Works Committee, have been meeting to prepare for the debate in their chamber.

Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the top Republican on Boxer’s committee, has vowed to stop the bill, calling it “the largest tax increase in American history” and saying the “razor-thin vote in the House spells doom in the Senate.”

China, India, Brazil

Lawmakers in both chambers have said they won’t support climate change restrictions that boost costs and put U.S. businesses and farmers at a competitive disadvantage with nations such as China, India and Brazil that may not take comparable steps.

“They gotta be put in the same category as we are; they can’t be listed as a developing country,” Senator Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, said in an interview. Iowa farmers produce corn-based ethanol, in competition with Brazil, which uses sugar cane to make the alternative fuel.

President Barack Obama will have a better chance of gaining commitments on emissions cuts from developing countries if he has votes for legislation from both chambers of Congress in hand in Copenhagen, said Elliot Diringer, vice president for international strategies at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change based in Arlington, Virginia.

Copenhagen Talks

The Copenhagen talks are an effort to negotiate a successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, an international climate agreement negotiated in part by Democratic Vice President Al Gore, which expires in 2012.

President George W. Bush rejected the Kyoto accord after it didn’t require developing countries to curb emissions. The Senate had passed a resolution 95-0 saying that members wouldn’t approve any treaty that lacked limits on India and China.

Todd Stern, the U.S. special envoy for climate change and Obama’s chief negotiator, has said developing nations must be part of a new accord. Under a U.S. proposal, those countries may agree to add renewable energy production or improve energy efficiency without taking on the specific emissions targets required of developed nations.

It’s too soon to worry about ratification of an international treaty, Boxer said in an interview.

“For me to speculate on how you get 67 votes for a treaty we haven’t yet seen, I just couldn’t do that,” Boxer said. “The most important thing now is for us to continue to act in the Congress so we give the president some wind at his back before Copenhagen.”

At the very least, Kerry said Obama will be able to go to Copenhagen with the House-passed measure and a draft of Senate legislation as a road map.

‘Tough Sledding’

Kerry’s doubts about lining up 67 Senate votes for a treaty were echoed by Harkin and Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat.

“That’s pretty tough sledding,” said Harkin, chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee.

“My major interest is manufacturing and how we preserve manufacturing,” Brown said in an interview. He said he wants a trade deal that protects U.S. companies in iron and steel, aluminum, cement, glass, pulp and paper, and chemicals.

“There’s a fine line here between what the rest of the world is expecting the U.S. to do and what may be politically possible in the Senate,” said Duncan Marsh, director of international climate policy for the Nature Conservancy, an Arlington, Virginia-based environmental group.

To contact the reporters on this story: Daniel Whitten in Washington at dwhitten2@bloomberg.net ; Jim Efstathiou Jr. in New York at jefstathiou@bloomberg.net .

Last Updated: July 2, 2009 00:00 EDT

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