Morning News Roundup on Kerry-Boxer Bill: Day Three

This morning, Politico is describing the tough path ahead for the Senate climate bill, given the doubts expressed by Senator Baucus (D, WY), but also reports that Senator Boxer (D, CA) is determined to get the bill out of committee even without Baucus, given negotiations she conducted with Senator Carper (D, DE) "who played a major role in negotiating a deal with coal-state members and is expected to back the legislation." (It looks, given the grumvblings reported in the article, like Senator Boxer knew that she had to overshoot Waxman-Markey's 17% GHG reduction goal initially in order to hold firm on it in the end, because a lot of folks are taking aim at the 20% figure.)

ClimateWire is reporting that the generosity initially seen in Kerry-Boxer in allocating more allowances to pro-climate moves like sustainable transportation and energy efficiency (as an earlier post discusses here) may not really improve on the House bill, given required deficit-reduction measures, in "Reality Sets In; Senate Allocation Pie Smaller Than House Climate Bill's."

And NPR reports on the "Battle of [the] Statistics" at yesterday's hearings, in which Senator Boxer announced to the assembled Republicans "Since you held up a chart [on Tuesday] we're going to have our little chart wars today — you hold up one and we hold up one; it's kind of equal time." (Its nice to see Boxer tackling the naysayers head-on: On Tuesday, she responded to statistical pronouncements and descriptions of research papers that she felt were distorted immediately, prompting Republicans to complain that she might drag the proceedings into a tit for tat.) According to NPR, Boxer's tough tone didn't stop (fossil fuels) industry executives from trying to invoke scary job-loss numbers, however. The full article can be seen here.