international treaties

House speaker now says she wants a climate bill passed by December

Backtracking on comments made earlier this month, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) now says she intends to schedule a vote on a climate bill before December, when world leaders are slated to meet in Copenhagen to hammer out a successor to the Kyoto climate pact.

Speaking to Bay Area reporters on Wednesday, Pelosi said she intends to have a cap-and-trade bill passed before the U.N.-sponsored summit, according to a report in today's San Francisco Chronicle. The legislation, she said, would help bring in funds to support other green initiatives.

"I believe we have to because we see that as a source of revenue," she said. "Cap-and-trade is there for a reason. You cap and you trade so you can pay for some of these investments in energy independence and renewables."

The collective environmental movement nearly had a melt down a few weeks ago when Pelosi said that while she has the votes to pass a climate bill in the House, it might not happen in 2009.

"I'm not sure this year, because I don't know if we'll be ready," Pelosi said in a press conference on Jan. 6. "We won't go before we're ready."

Henry Waxman (D-Calif), whose Energy and Commerce Committee is likely to lead any House action on climate legislation, said last week that he intends to have a climate bill ready by Memorial Day.

U.S. negotiating team in Poznan dodges questions on Bush’s climate inactivism

Below is another dispatch from the climate talks in Poland by CAP Senior Fellow Andrew Light, first printed in WonkRoom. —– In one of the more surreal moments of this year’s U.N. climate change talks, Bush’s chief environmental adviser blamed Russia for the Bush administration’s climate change obstructionism. The U.S. negotiating team featuring James Connaughton, […]

After Poland talks, a new reality starts to set in, says McKibben; 350 ppm must be the goal

I spent the last few nights of the recent Poznan climate conference sleeping in the By the Way youth hostel, an excellent accommodation filled with excellent young people who had done excellent work at the negotiations. After the final day of deliberations, many of these young people visited the doubtless excellent discotheques of Poznan, returning […]

IYD: Next global climate agreement must safeguard survival of all countries, all peoples

This is a guest post from Poznan by David Sievers of SustainUS, an organization for 18-26 year-olds from the United States who are interested in engaging with global processes on sustainability. —– I am writing in the midst of a dramatic shift in global climate policy. The official President’s Summary of COP-14 bears witness to […]

IYD: Next global climate agreement must safeguard survival of all countries, all peoples

I am writing in the midst of a dramatic shift in global climate policy. The official President’s Summary of COP-14 bears witness to this shift and signals the guiding principle of a just and equitable post-2012 climate agreement next year in Copenhagen. And this outcome is due in large part to the work of young […]

It’s ‘premature’ to declare the death of an agreement in Copenhagen

[I’m going to reprint dispatches from the climate talks in Poland by Center for American Progress senior fellow Andrew Light, which were first printed in WonkRoom.] It goes by various names here: “The chicken and egg problem,” “The ping pong problem,” mostly though it’s just “The American problem.” All are various terms for the same […]

Gore embraces 350 ppm target at Poznan

[This post is from Bill McKibben in Poland. For background on the science behind the 350 target and the challenge it poses see here and here.] Al Gore gave the international climate talks in Poznan a new set of marching orders this afternoon, declaring that old targets for fighting global warming had been made obsolete […]

The moral voice on climate can become policy brokers or enviro activists

[In my effort to highlight other climate bloggers, I’m reprinting this post from Richard Graves, of It’s Getting Hot in Here, since it’s their future we “adults” are destroying.] The world is halfway through the process to create a global climate treaty to respond to Global Warming. In the halls around me, government, NGO, and […]

International youth call out Merkel and Tusk in Warsaw

On the day after German Chancellor Angela Merkel publicly announced that she would block needed reforms to the European Union’s climate package, a crowd of 200 people from more than 20 countries loudly called her and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk to task outside the prime minister’s residence in Warsaw. The rally began less than […]